shoesfullofdust

Years ago I cobbled together a bookmarklet that would produce a snippet of HTML code - basically a link to the page I was currently visiting. It would incorporate the title tag of the page as the title attribute for the link and take any selected/highlighted text and use that as the link text. If no text was selected, it would use the page title as the link text.

The idea is simple: you're visiting a page and you decide you want to blog it. Select the text you want as your link text. Hit the bookmarklet. The browser displays a prompt dialog that presents you with the HTML for the link you want. Copy that. Paste it into your editor(advanced posterous users can now paste it into an email). Done.

No need to type all of that <a href="http://www.blahblah.example.net" title="...

It worked fine in firefox but not IE. It still works for me. I've been using it steadily since I first put it together and to this day still find it incredibly useful. Even if I need to do some editing to the code after the fact, having the bookmarklet generate the HTML for the link saves me a lot of time when blogging or putting together web pages.

I have no idea if it works in any other browsers and I'm not really interested in delving into that. Nor am I really equiped to do that. But I thought I would put it out there again in case any javascript afficiandos might care to have a look and take a stab at making this into something more useful.

Here is the lazyA bookmarklet code . It is based on David A. Lindquist's Anatomy of a Bookmarklet and his Google Search example bookmarklet.

One of the things I attempted was to encode any ampersamds in the URL in order to make clean, W3C validator compliant links. This caused problems when trying to add the bookmarklet - browsers tend to convert the &amp; in the code into an &.

So there it is. The lazyA bookmarklet has been stuck at v2 since June 27, 2004. I'm not about to do anything with it, but I thought you might.

plain text and exploded view of lazy A

Thanks Wayback Machine!

All links in this post generated by lazyA™

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1) if you are seen to be using a "p" instead of a proper Icelandic thorn character when you stick you're tongue out at me, I will dismiss all of your output and pray for your speedy enlightenment.

2) I generally don't appreciate emoticons. I can handle the text versions but detest those horrid little yellow .gif balls and will find a way turn them off if there's any reason to continue reading. Their presence usually indicates to me that no, there isn't any reason to continue reading.

3) They fascinate me in the way that language related things do and I spend far to much time wondering if they are actually words or indeed merely symbols as everyone seems to think they are. And if I were to write my own dictionary would I list them before "A" or after "Z".

4) When I find myself about to use one, I'll stop and ask myself if there isn't a better way for me to convey my thoughts. Am I expressing myself clearly? Am I belabouring the obvious? It also causes me to rethink my relationship with my audience. If I need an emoticon in my message perhaps my message is inappropriate. Am I trying to weasel my way into a different level of intimacy/familiarity? Are my jokes that bad?

5) If someone uses a word I don't understand or uses a word in a way I don't understand I will always try to figure it out. I almost never bother to do this with an emoticon I don't understand. They just don't have the same weight with me.

6) Emoticons are one of the main reasons I avoid internet forums and seldom use chat services of any kind.

7) Rather than adding to the tonality of messages, I find they generally degrade conversations. Lazy and fake are the two words that come to mind.

8) I wear glasses and am happy.

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