Hi, this is Chris Maciello from VitaminCM.com today I’ll going to talk about using bookmarklet to improve your browsing experience.
So bookmarklet is a little piece of java script that sits on your bookmark’s toolbar that allows you to perform certain actions on a website. If I click over to this page, it’s a gifts ideas for your tech loving brothers, so maybe I wanted to email this to my sisters so she knows where to get me. I can click on this Gmail this bookmarklet and that just opens a little pop up window and it’s ready to go with the email. So all I have to do is put in the recipient’s address. And I could type little thing in here. I just clicked send. And that’s it, just close the window.
So there's a bunch of different bookmarklets that you can use that I have setup here. For instance, let’s have a look on this site for the MetsBlog, which is my favorite baseball team. If I look in this site and say “Wow, it looks pretty cool, I want to subscribe to that in my RSS reader.” I have one here that’s called Subscribe, when I click it, it redirects me to Google Reader and it has a subscribe button here. So all I have to do is click this subscribe link.
Here's a particular article on the MetsBlog that I was just looking at and there's some other options I could do. So let’s say that I wanted to remember to come back here and read this and go through this article later. So I have a link here called Add to RTN, if I click this. It will open up a little window for Remember the Milk and it puts a task name which will be the title of the page. I could put a due dates. Put tags on here. And click add task. And that’s it, it just adds the task to my Remember the Milk cue and I can close the window.
Couple of other things, so if you look here. I have this list, its 100 best bookmarklets for writers, researchers, and students. So these are different bookmarklets and I just want to show you how easy it is to add them. The first thing you need to do is go into view toolbars and bookmarks toolbar. You need to expose that and that’s what this is, so it doesn’t really matter whether you use any operating system or any browser. I'm using a Mac and I'm using FireFox right now. But I'm going to show you how it works in some other browsers as well. So there's a ton of different bookmarklets here that are useful. There's one down here, search and highlight that I thought was particularly useful. So this is all you have to do to use a bookmarklet, just click on it. Drag it up to your bookmark’s toolbar and drop it. And there it is. So now, if I come back to this article on the MetsBlog and I click search and highlight. It opens up a little search field, and I’ll put in baseball. Hit OK. And you’ll notice, everyone on the page that the word baseball is, it highlights it. So that’s some pretty cool functionality.
Now I just want to show you how well this works in some other browsers. So, here I have opened Opera and I’ll click the Gmail one which is the only one I have installed here. And it just opens the Gmail window and I need to log in, because I'm not log in on Opera. And open it up on Safari. And I have few here, so let’s say I want to take piece of this and save it to Evernote for my notes. I could just highlight it. Click to Evernote. And I would sign in and I could just create it there.
So I don’t have Internet Explorer because I'm running the Mac right now. But it works exactly the same on Internet Explorer, Opera, Mac, Google Chrome, whatever browser you use. And they just sit in your bookmark’s toolbar on whichever browser you're using. And it’s pretty simple when you see a bookmarklet that you like, you just click on it, drag it up to that bookmark. And it’s just a little button where you're going to take action.
So that’s how you use bookmarklets to improve your browsing experience.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services