Title: The Beauty of Simple Bookmarklets
Author: Alex Kirk
Published: March 11, 2024
Last modified: March 15, 2024

---

# The Beauty of Simple Bookmarklets

March 11, 2024

[Jeremy Keith posted about bookmarklets that he uses for testing websites](https://adactio.com/journal/20965)
where he specifically likes those that just pass on the current URL to a service.
Those bookmarklets typically have a structure like:

    ```wp-block-code
    javascript:location.href='https://example.com?s='+escape(location.href)
    ```

I use those for my [Friends WordPress plugin](https://wpfriends.at/), too. That’s
the one where you can follow people via RSS or ActivityPub and see the feed in a
private section of your blog [or even in Mastodon apps](https://wordpress.org/plugins/enable-mastodon-apps/).

![](https://alex.kirk.at/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/tools-bookmarklets-1024x359.
png)

A screenshot of my WordPress tools section.

So, to follow the current website, you’d click on a bookmarklet like this:

    ```wp-block-code
    javascript:location.href='https://example.com?add-friend='+escape(location.href)
    ```

I have another WordPress plugin called [Post Collection](https://github.com/akirk/friends-post-collection),
where you can save articles to your blog. Both to be able to search them later, 
or, with [my Send to E-Reader plugin](https://github.com/akirk/friends-send-to-e-reader),
to send them to your favorite reading device as a compiled e-book with chapters.
Although the bookmarklet that you’d typically install has some logic to post the
whole current page body so that it also works on non-public posts, there is also
a version that looks like this:

    ```wp-block-code
    javascript:location.href='https://example.com?user=123&collect-post='+escape(location.href)
    ```

One particularly nice thing about these style of bookmarklets, is that while unfortunately
they don’t (or didn’t?) work on [Firefox Mobile](https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/browsers/mobile/android/),
you can use an Android app called [URL Forwarder](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.daverix.urlforward)
to share a URL from any other app which comes in quite handy when you use other 
apps to discover interesting content (such as awesome the [Glider app](https://github.com/Mosc/Glider/)
for Hacker News).

![](https://alex.kirk.at/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/url-forwarder-464x1024.
png)

![](https://alex.kirk.at/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/url-forwarder-in-action-
464x1024.png)

I have only added my two bookmarklets here, but [most of the ones Jeremy mentioned](https://adactio.com/journal/20965)
could also be added.

By the way, I have some history with bookmarklets. In 2005, I created a [bookmarklet manager called Blummy](https://blummy.com/).
It’s still alive but dormant (ping me if you want to try it, signups have been spammed
to death).

![](https://alex.kirk.at/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/03/blummy.gif)

Bookmarklets have come out of fashion but were very important back then. I wished
browsers would support them better and make installing them a little less awkward.
They are always like a little swiss army knife to me.

[Web](https://alex.kirk.at/category/web/)

Read this next

[Previous Post](https://alex.kirk.at/2024/02/16/1927632/)

### Leave a Reply 󠀁[Cancel reply](https://alex.kirk.at/2024/03/11/the-beauty-of-simple-bookmarklets/?output_format=md#respond)󠁿

Only people in [my network](https://alex.kirk.at/friends/) can comment.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. [Learn how your comment data is processed.](https://akismet.com/privacy/)