A Pair of URL-Shortening Bookmarklets (Shallow Thoughts)

A Pair of URL-Shortening Bookmarklets

I'm not a big fan of URL-shortening services -- I like to see what page I'm about to load so I know if I want to go there. But with Twitter's 160-character limit, URL shorteners become necessary. It's tiresome to type in bit.ly every time, so I wanted a bookmark to say "give me a shortened version of the current URL".

Surprisingly, I had a hard time finding one. bit.ly itself has one on their front page, but it didn't work for me. Upon examination, it looks like their bookmark wants to read the clipboard, so you'd have to select a URL first before shortening it (though they don't actually tell you that). I don't want that extra step, so I made my own. Actually two of them.

First, a Javascript version that takes the current URL, encodes it and sends it to bit.ly. I gave it the keyword "bitly", so when I'm on a page, I just type "bitly" in the URLbar and it goes to bit.ly and makes the shortened URL.

The only problem with that is that I'd rather have the option of opening it in a new tab, so I can continue to read the original page. Normally I open new tabs by typing in a URL and typing Ctrl-Return (normally it's Alt-Return in Firefox, but it drives me nuts that Firefox uses Ctrl-click for new tab but Alt-Return and I can never keep them straight, and Firefox's normal behavior for Ctrl-Return is brain-dead useless so that's the first thing I fix when I get a Firefox update).

With this bitly bookmarklet, Ctrl-Return and Alt-Return don't work -- because then you lose the original tab's URL, and bitly gives you a shortened URL to nowhere ... "nowhere" being defined, in the bitly universe, as http://about.com (go figure). What to do?

So I made a second bookmarklet using a different technique: instead of using Javascript to get the current page's URL, call the bookmarklet with the URL as argument. I called this one bitly2. So if I'm pointing at http://shallowsky.com/blog/ and I want a shortened version in a new tab, I type:

Ctrl-L to go to the URLbar
Ctrl-A to go to the beginning of the URL
bitly2 and a space (inserted at the beginning before the URL)
so now I'll see bitly2 http://shallowsky.com/blog/
Ctrl-Return (or Alt-Return) to open in a new tab.

I'm not sure which one I'll end up using more, but I'll obviously change the bitly2 name to something better if I end up using it a lot.

If you want to use either of these bookmarklets: right-click on the link and choose Bookmark this link. Then, alas, since Firefox still doesn't let you enter a keyword in its Bookmarks dialog, you have to go to Bookmarks->Organize Bookmarks, find the bookmarklet you just added and click on it, click on More, and finally you can give it a keyword.

There used to be a Firefox extension called Openbook that let you see the Keyword field when you first add a bookmark, but it doesn't work any more in 3.5, alas. There's another extension called "Add Bookmark Here 2" that's supposed to do it, but the file on addons.mozilla.org is apparently corrupted and won't install. I don't understand why the Firefox crew is so obsessed with bookmark tags (for which I've never found any use) but won't let you add something as truly useful as a keyword. (It's bug 242834, marked WONTFIX.)

Of course, after I had my bookmarklets I finally found a page with a decent bit.ly bookmarklet very similar to my first one: A Quick Tutorial on JavaScript Bookmarklets.

Tags: bookmarklets, twitter, javascript
[ 15:34 Aug 18, 2009    More tech/web | permalink to this entry | ]