Monday, May 04, 2009

Handy Bookmarklet!

Just a cool little tool to make the web nicer and more readable:

Readability from Arc90 Lab.

A bookmarklet is a little piece of script that tells the computer how to do something additional. In this case, you can control how the font appears and how large; you control the size of the margins as well. These functions add a huge amount to the readability of the web pages you visit.

The name, bookmarklet, tells you how you make it work. You either save it as a bookmark, or drag it into your web browser's toolbar. Then, when you visit a web page where you want to use it, click on the Readability bookmark up there, and choose how you want to force to page to appear. Yay!

For other bookmarklets of extreme usefulness, visit http://www.bookmarklets.com/. You can browse through their ever-growing list, for Windows, Mac, Unix, and more. More than 150 are available. One of my favorites:

Page Freshness (there is a version for frames and without)- shows how recently the page was updated. This is very useful since the major browsers no longer have a function that displays this information.

Pay attention to the browser information. If you use Firefox, Bookmarklets may not be so helpful as I did not find any that were compatible with the current Firefox version.

1 comment:

Betsy McKenzie said...

Aha! There is a similar bookmarklet & Firefox add-on, called TidyRead, at http://www.tidyread.com/

Cheers!