What can you do with a single, consolidated bookmarklet that you cannot do by simply placing your bookmarklets in a folder? For one thing, you can easily share or publish collections of bookmarklets. Moreover, the popup window of bookmarklets (see top right screenshot) can be set to be displayed on various parts of the screen. It is also a simply unique way to go about organizing (and using) your bookmarklets.

If you are interested in some cool, value added bookmarklets: check out my list of “Twelve must have bookmarklets“. A combined version of all of these can be found here (drag and drop to your browser toolbar). See screenshot to the right for a preview.

Some notes on this service:

• How to create a consolidated bookmarklet: simply type in the name and paste in the javascript code on the bookmarklet combiner site. Choose from a number of options, such as whether the end result should run them all in batch or display in a popup. (See top left screenshot).
• Editing a consolidated bookmarklet: unfortunately, there does not seem to be an option to load it back up again once a consolidated bookmarklet is created. You’ll have to re-do the whole thing.
• Creating a consolidated bookmarklet for “normal” URLs: is possible, should you want to do that for whatever reason.

The verdict: a very interesting and unique service. You could say that there is a bit of a question mark over the utility that it provides, but that depends somewhat on the user and what you might want to use it for.

One thing I would wish for the ability to re-load a bookmarklet in order to change or edit it.

Visit the Bookmarklet Combiner page.

These days most people (myself included) prefer to install browser plugin or extensions that can potentially add more complex functionality than a bookmarklet and provide much more integration with your browser experience. But the fact remains: a short snippet of code in a bookmarklet is a much more elegant and portable solution than an extension or plugin that needs to be installed and may be constantly taking up memory. An added bonus: bookmarklets will almost always work on any browser.

I recently switched to Chrome after Google’s browser added support for extensions in earnest (and in fact wrote an article about the must-have extensions for Google Chrome). I did, however, find myself transferring over to Chrome some indispensable bookmarklets that I was using on my previous browser; hence the idea for this posting was born.

This posting will present my favorite 12 useful bookmarklets that I use: Email This from Clickability, ClipNabber, Readability, PrintWhatYouLike, PageZipper, BitLet bookmarklet, FirebugLite, View Passwords, BugMeNot, Bit.ly, Map This, and Design.

1. Email This from Clickability

(You can register for an account with Email This if you would like address book integration and the like, but that is totally optional).

The bookmarklet itself: Email This. (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
Click here to view my previous full review of this service.
Go here to visit the Email This home page.

2. ClipNabber

All you need to do is click the bookmarklet while on the page of the video you want to download. Note, however, that you need to be browsing videos on the video sharing sites themselves and not watching them embedded in blogs and the like, in order for the bookmarklet to work. (In almost all cases, clicking on the video itself no matter where it is located will transport you to the video page on the video sharing service).

The bookmarklet itself: Nab It! (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
Click here to view my previous full review of this service.
Go here to visit the Clipnabber home page.

3. Readability

This can come in handy if the page is extremely busy and/or confusing, or if you want a single-click printable version of the page.

The bookmarklet itself: Readability (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
Go here to visit the Readability home page.

4. PrintWhatYouLike

PrintWhatYouLike is amazingly versatile; simply click on any element on the page and you could isolate, remove, resize or save it, to name a few options. It also offers the option to remove all images from a page in one fell sweep.Simply a great bookmarklet to have.

The bookmarklet itself: PrintWhatYouLike (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
Go here to visit the PrintWhatYouLike home page.

5. Bitlet bookmarklet

The Bitlet bookmarklet works on a wide range of Torrent sites and will transform the torrent links to Bitlet links that open and download via Bitlet (see screenshot).

The bookmarklet itself: BitLet (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
Go here to visit the BitLet home page.

6. View Passwords

I had a bookmarklet that does this in my browser for an exremely long time, but when I searched the internet to find the source I came upon the one mentioned here, which is even better than the one I had originally.

The bookmarklet itself: View Passwords (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
Go here to visit the original View Passwords page.

7. PageZipper

I like PageZipper because it works with sites that have “previous/next” links at the bottom as well as sites, like this one, that have page numbered navigation. Some browser extensions that offer the same functionality will offer the former but not the latter.

PageZipper will display browsing arrows in the upper right corner that can be really handy for navigation (see screenshot).

The bookmarklet itself: PageZipper. (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
Click here to view my previous full review of this service.
Go here to visit the PageZipper home page.

8. Firebug Lite

Unfortunately, Firebug is not available for other, non-Firefox browsers, but Firebug Lite is. It doesn’t provide the breadth of functionality that Firebug does, but for quick inspections of pages or page elements it will work just fine in a pinch, without requiring you to switch to Firefox.

The bookmarklet itself: Firebug Lite (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
Go here to visit the Firebug Lite home page.

9. BugMeNot

But don’t expect the logins to work every time. BugMeNot will actually give you a percentage of times the password worked, based on user votes.

The bookmarklet itself: BugMeNot. (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
Click here to view my previous full review of this service.
Go here to visit the BugMeNot home page.

10. Bit.ly

The bookmarklet itself: Bit.ly. (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
Go here to visit the Bit.ly home page.

11. Map This

The bookmarklet itself: Map This. (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
I actually have no idea where I got this, but here’s a page that has some good Google maps bookmarklets info.

12. Design

I just kind of piled up some of the tools on the page simultaneously for the screenshot to the right, in order to show off some of the functionality, so it looking very busy. In real life situations each one of the tools would be used separately of course.

The bookmarklet itself: Design. (drag and drop onto your bookmarks toolbar)
Go here to visit the Design home page.

Email This from Clickability is a free bookmarklet that resides on your browser toolbar and can quickly email any web page that you are browsing to yourself or friends. It supports most browsers, including IE, Firefox, Opera, and AOL.

Have you ever read a really good posting or news story that you wanted to share with a friend or friends? I remember many a time that I would copy a URL, open my Gmail account, and paste into a new email message in order to do this. More recently we have had the proliferation of "Email This Article" links on blogs and websites that make it easy to email a story in a single click straight from the website, although many of these still rely on opening your default local email client to do this, which can be a hassle (especially if you use webmail and do not use a local client).

"Email This" lets you email the URL of any site that you are surfing (to yourself or to others) in a single click. Here are more notes on this service:

• Uses it’s own browser-based form: clicking on the "Email This" bookmarklet will instantly display an email form. It is self contained and does not need a local client or webmail client to send.
• Keeping an address book: registering for the "Email This" service will allow you to maintain an address book that collects and maintains all the email addresses you send to for future re-use. Note that you do not need to register to use the service.
• Installing: involves right clicking on the bookmarklet and adding it to your "Links" folder in IE or "Bookmarks Toolbar" in Firefox. For more info on installing click here.
• Other bookmarklets: in addition to "Email This", the site offers a "Save This" and "Organize & Share" bookmarklets which provide a fairly advanced online bookmarking service. You can use your "Email This" account for these as well.

The verdict: so simply and yet (potentially) so useful. You will never need to search high on low on a website again looking for that elusive "Email this article" link which many or may not be there. You can now spam email interesting articles to yourself and to friends with ease.

Compatibility: IE, Firefox, Opera, AOL, MSN; most likely other browsers as well.

Go to the Email This page.

Internet Explorer may not have the breadth of plugins that exist for Firefox, but it does have many extensions that enhance its functionality and that can greatly increase your productivity. IE extensions, it seems, always have much less .. visibility .. than those for Firefox; in this posting I present to you five must-have Internet Explorer extensions which you never knew existed (but will be very happy to learn about):

1. RCGoogle: the name is misleading, as it suggests that this is yet another right-click-on-a-word-to-search-Google extension. In fact RCGoogle does offer this functionality, but what makes it cool is it’s other function: “Open selected URL”.

Occasionally you might come across URLs (such as hxxp://www.yahoo.com) that have been purposefully (or unpurposefully) distorted or changed that normally would require fixing and copy/pasting into the address box. RCGoogle allows you to simply right click on the URL (or what looks like one ) and choose “open selected URL” in the context menu to open it. It is quite powerful as it can handle a wide range of URL problems. Check out the following examples, all of which it can handle without a hitch: (http) hxxp://www.yahoo.com; (www) w*w.yahoo.com; (typos) htp://yahoo.com; (whitespaces) http://www. yahoo.com; (or a combination of the above) h**p:’/***.yahoo .com. Of course you can use RCGoogle to open non-maligned URLs as well. Works for http and ftp URLs both.

I like this program so much that I am awarding it the very sought after Freewaregenius Pick award. More info on this program here; you can download the version I tested here.

2. IECopySelectedLinks: this little extension allows you to select a bunch of text that contains links to multiple URLs, then right-click “copy selected links” to copy all links to the clipboard (the text itself will not be copied). Very cool!

Visit this page to download (286K). This software from the same developers that brought you previously reviewed IESessions.

3. Find as you type: installs a search box on the IE toolbar that will interactively find and highlight the first instance of the search string as you type it. It also makes it easy to scroll through instances of the search string in the page, and adds the ability to highlight all instances of your search string that occur in the page. (The screenshot illustrates this very well).

If you use IE’s internal CTRL+F function you simply MUST check this one out; it will make your life so much easier. Note that this function is available as part of other IE addons such as the famous IE7Pro and ALToolbar.

To download visit the program page (817K; 32 and 64 bit versions available). Or go here for a full review of this one on Freewaregenius.

4. Favorites Search: as the name implies, this IE extension provides you with the ability to search your favorites. This program will look inside both the names as well as the URLs of your stored favorites when looking for matches, and works really well.

The “Favorites Search” plugin can provide a substitute for organizing your favorites in folders it enables you to retrieve a bookmark that you are looking for in your collection of favorites simply by searching for it (but then again you could always search Google).

Make sure to add the “Favorites Search” button to your IE toolbar, as that is the easiest and most user friendly way to access this plugin. To do this run the installer then launch IE; right click the command bar, select “Customize command bar” then “add and remove commands”, then add the “Favorites Search” button from the left pane to the list of
available commands (on the right pane) in the placement you like.

To download visit the program page (approx 750K).

5. Web Archives Viewer: adds an entry to IE’s context menu that allows you right click on a zip archive without downloading it in order to peer inside and examine its contents (you are not able to drag and drop into your desktop though!).

To download visit the developer’s page (approx 554K); scroll all the way down the page.

For more cool IE extensions look at the following:

• CoolIris (formerly Piclens).
• Tidy Favorites
• IESessions
• Local Website Archive
• ALToolbar
• IE Open Last Closed Tab
• IE Alias
• IESpell
• ALPass

If you are looking for a better way to manage favorites than the default bookmarking process that Internet Explorer and Firefox provide, check out Tidy Favorites. This program combines four concepts that make it much easier and more practical to work with your saved URLs, as follows:

1. Thumbnails: a bookmark is added as a visible thumbnail of the website, making it much more intuitive to work with (and much more pleasant) than the standard text link. Thumbnails can be resized manually at will and placed in the location that makes sense to the user.
2. Organize into tabs or folders or both: Tidy favorites provides a customizable workspace that can accomodate both tabs and folders, in effect providing a “3D” organizational structure where each tab can contain it’s own set of folders. This is much more flexible than the default 2D hierarchical structure that the browsers use.
3. Drop stack: this is an area to the right of the screen where URLs first appear (in thumbnail form) when you bookmark them. You can either drag and drop your new thumbnails into the proper tab or folder or simply use the drop stack as a temporary area for web pages that you want to look at at some convenient point in time but not add to your bookmarks collection.
4. Centralized bookmarking across browsers: Tidy Favorites works interchangeably in IE and Firefox both: if you use both browser your URLs that are saved in one browser will also instantly appear on the other.

More notes on this program as follows:

• The Tidy Favorites page: you can access this from the browser toolbar by clicking on the “Tidy Favorites” button or otherwise use it as your home page (or one of your home pages). It makes for quite a good looking home page, if I may say so, and provides a quick search box that can be used to search Google, Google images, or Wikipedia. It does not seem to give the option to change search providers, although I am not at all complaining about their pre-set search choices.
• Thumbnails: can be static (where the image does not update itself) or dynamic (where the thumbnail image is updated to reflect changes). Thumbnails can both be resized at will as well as “zoomed into” using the mouse wheel. You can thus zoom into a certain section or area of a website that displays updated information (e.g. a stock ticker, a latest comments section, etc) and if the thumbnail is set to update automatically you will end up with a kind of improvised information widget within Tidy Favorites.
• Portable: you can install a portable version of Tidy Favorites to carry your favorites around on a flash drive (when you first run the installer it will ask you if you want to do this). I did not try this myself.
• Controls: two buttons are provided (“display Tidy Favorites”, and “add a URL to Tidy Favorites”). For both browsers you will most probably need to add these to the command bar manually (click here for more info). The Tidy Favorites buttons seem to magically appear on the Google Toolbar if you are using it which I personally found helpful. Tidy Favorites can also optionally run with Windows and appear as an icon in the system tray (which I was not too keen on).
• Importing favorites: you can drag and drop your browser favorites onto the Tidy Favorites page to add them to it (although unfortunately you cannot drag entire folders).
• Memory consumption: the process “TidyFavorites.exe”, which consumes approx 24 megs of memory has to be running in memory in order for Tiny Favorites to work. This is not a lot of memory but certainly not lightweight.
• Differences between free and paid versions: aside from being skinnable and the developers offering personalized tech support/automatic updates for the paid version, there does not seem to be any substantiative differences. It seems that the makers of this want to make the paid version attractive for people to buy but haven’t figured it out yet (kudos to them for not turning the free version of Tidy Favorites into crippleware). How about online bookmarks synchronization across machines guys?; How about synchronizing with, say, Del.icio.us? That might be worth paying for.

Wish list (or how this program can be even better)

• The ability to select multiple thumbnails and simultaneously set them all to the same size, resize them collectively, or move them together to a tab or folder. At the moment each thumbnail has to be managed on its own.
• Applying “magnetic thumbnails” where two thumbnails snap together if they are within a certain distance of each other.
• The ability to move the Tidy Favorites data file from “application data” to a user-defined folder.

The verdict: an innovative bookmark manager that takes a few simple concepts and puts them together in an intuitive way that makes sense. If you have been searching for a bookmark management program that is both practical and provides a good user experience, by all means check this one out. Tidy Favorites is strictly for local favorites management, though, which may be a strike against it when most bookmark management programs seem to be clamoring to sync online; but be that as it may this program is definitely a winner and I recommend it wholeheartedly!

Version Tested: 3.53

Compatibility: Windows XP, Vista.

Go to the program page to download the latest version (approx 3.9 megs).