We are know that web pages can be bookmarked.  The act of saving web pages for future browsing has become second nature.  However, today we’re going to talk about the bookmarklet, which is a bookmark but with magical powers (sometimes).

First off, let’s recap on what a bookmark does.  A bookmark is designed to copy a URL (the http://… thingy) into your address bar and send you to that location.  The key point here is that the browser simply gets passed a bit of information that it understands and it executes the command (GO HERE!).

A bookmarklet is the same thing, just with (sometimes) a more interesting result.  Instead of passing a URL to the browser, it sends a little piece of code (called JavaScript).  This little piece of code has some restrictions for security, but it can be very powerful when it comes to aesthetics.  Anything on the page can be fiddled with using JavaScript.

To show you what I mean, here is an example bookmarklet explained:

A good bookmarklet is available from Twitlet.com.  Here you provide you username and password to Twitter and the site generates a bookmarklet for you to save.  Anytime you click on the bookmarklet, you receive this box:

Anything you type is sent to twitter as an update without leaving the page you are visiting.

Once you’ve found a bookmarklet to use, you can drag it into your browser toolbar for quick access.  For example, here it is in Google Chrome.

And here is an example in Internet Explorer:

If you don’t see a bookmark bar or favorites bar, you might need to enable it.

Now that you know what a bookmarklet can do, try searching the web for bookmarklets to your favorite services!  They exist for Gmail, Google talk, twitter, Google calendar, etc…  Just about everything!

Finally, here are some (overkill) points before you go:

1. If you want to try out some of my bookmarklets for Google tasks, Google talk and Gmail (including bookmarklets for Google Apps users) go here.
2. On thegeekiness.com, I went into some detail on how to create bookmarks and provided some examples.  Check this out if you want to know how to create your own bookmarklet.
3. If you’d like to wade through a ton of possible bookmarklets, try out bookmarklets.com.

Good luck in your bookmarklet endeavors

~ab