rudimentary fragments of a discontinued etherbot
“Be in this world as if you are a traveler, a passerby, with your clothes and shoes full of dust. Sometimes you sit under the shade of a tree, sometimes you walk in the desert. Be always a passerby, for this is not home.”
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lazyA Calls Upon the Lazyweb
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 & 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!
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