I regularly use bookmarklets to speed up everyday tasks, such as:
- adding a blog to my Google Reader account
- bookmarking a page in delicious
- rendering a page more simply so I can focus on the text and not all the sidebars, banners, etc.
- saving a blog post in a “to be read later” location
Over the years, I added lots of these little bookmarklets to the bookmarks toolbar and saw my toolbar get more and more busy. Recently, I discovered a tool that will take all my bookmarklets and combine them into one single button on my toolbar. When I click that super bookmarklet, I get a tiny window that allows me to select which bookmarklet I want to use.
The tool I used for this is called Bookmarklet Combiner. You can build your own on the site (the developer’s blog offers instructions) or you might just want to use mine (the site can save your bookmarklet and assign it a unique URL).
Here are the bookmarklets that are in my instance of the Bookmarklet Combiner:
- Subscribe (uses the official bookmarklet from Google Reader that lets you subscribe to a feed without having to leave the page with that feed; this bookmarklet is found in Google Reader >> Settings >> Goodies)
- Readability (uses the Readability bookmarklet to clean up web pages and make the main body of text much easier to read)
- Read Later (uses the Instapaper bookmarklet to save the page to my Instapaper account)
- Printliminator (uses the Printliminator bookmarklet to re-render the page you are viewing and let you select elements you want to remove before you print)
- MarkUp (uses the MarkUp.io bookmarklet to let you annotate web pages and share them with others)
- bit.ly (uses the bit.ly bookmarklet to generate shortened URLs for whatever page you are on)