Geek to Live: Ten Must-Have Bookmarklets

by Gina Trapani

A bookmarklet is a snippet of Javascript that can be bookmarked (or saved as a favorite) inside your web browser. Bookmarklets can enhance web pages, add special functionality and make your browsing experience a lot more efficient by offering one-click access to useful tools.

In this special feature, I present ten useful bookmarklets that always have a place in my browser chrome. Maybe there’s room in yours, too.

To use any of these bookmarklets, drag and drop the link onto your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. If the toolbar is not visible, from your browser’s View menu, enable the Bookmarks toolbar. Update, 3/06: See this helpful screencast on bookmarklets to get started.

Without further ado, and in no particular order, my top bookmarklet picks:

1. Acronym lookup
   LOL, RTFM, YMMV AFAIK! If you stumble upon one of those nutty Internet-speak acronyms all the kids are using today and you’re all WTF - highlight it, click this bookmarklet, and automatically look it up using the Acronymn Finder.
2. Google Translate
   What do you do when you stumble across a web page that’s definitely saying something you want to know, except it’s in a language you don’t speak? You translate it, of course. This bookmarklet runs a web page through Google’s translation service and automatically detects the language of the page.
3. Urban Dictionary lookup
   Similar to the acronym lookup, this bookmarklet will look up selected text on a web page in the Urban Dictionary, the collaboratively-edited slang dictionary. Cool beans.
4. Wikipedia lookup
   Highlight text on any web page and perform a Wikipedia search. Came in handy for me recently with our post on lampreys.
5. Alexa site profile
   Find out everything you ever wanted to know about any web site you’re currently viewing using Alexa’s profile page. View traffic stats and charts, related sites, and inbound links.
6. del.icio.us linkbacks UPDATE, 3/06: del.icio.us linkbacks
   See what del.icio.us users bookmarked a web page and what tags they assigned to it with one click. I will be using this one to gauge how useful readers found this very feature. Recursively meta, I know.
7. View cookies
   Cookies are small text files web sites plant on your hard drive to save the state of things, track where you have been on that site or keep you logged in. Check out all the cookies a site has set for you with this bookmarklet.
8. Toss cookies
   

   Tags: bookmarksweb 2.0

   Popularity: 2% [?]

   Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

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