Like many of the enthusiastic early technology adopters (a nice way of saying “obsessive geeks”) I know, my browser’s bookmark toolbar (the bookmarks that are ever-present along the top of my Firefox window) is overflowing with special-purpose “bookmarklets”—special-purpose bookmarks that actually run a javascript to accomplish a task. One of them, for example, lets me add a page to my del.icio.us bookmarks. Another converts an Amazon item page URL to a version that includes my Amazon Associates ID so that I can get a small % of the profits when someone buys an item because I linked to it. Two others do a searches for the page I’m looking at in del.icio.us or Technorati, so I can see who’s linking to or writing about the site.
The problem is that they’re overflowing the bookmark bar now, so I have to give them short, cryptic names to fit them all in. And that makes them hard to find.
The solution? A nifty little too called “Blummy,” which lets me consolidate them all into one. The web-based interface on the Blummy site lets you configure the size and contents of your bookmarklet collection. When you’re done configuring the tool, you simply put the Blummly bookmarklet link in your toolbar in place of the many links it contains. Clicking on the Blummly link displays a nice little CSS div on your screen that contains all of the blummlets you’ve specificied.
They’ve got a quite a few “standard issue” bookmarklets on there for people who are looking to add some functionality. But more importantly, for me, they offer the ability for you to build your own “blummlet,” thereby allowing me to replicate all the bookmarklets that were cluttering up my toolbar.
So, what’s in my Blummly box? Right now, I’ve got 7 blummlets:
Most people won’t ever have a need for this…but for those of us who tend to collect these special-purpose bookmarks, Blummly is a great tool.
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