Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Two useful bookmarklets

What is a bookmarklet, exactly? It's "an applet, a small computer application, stored as the URL of a bookmark in a web browser or as a hyperlink on a web page." Thanks, Wikipedia. Here are two useful bookmarklets:

quietube removes the clutter from web videos.

Readability removes clutter from web pages. Also good for making clean PDFs or print versions of online materials. Readability seems to work best with pages displaying a single article or post.

These bookmarklets seem to me especially helpful in classroom settings, where one might want to look at a news item or film clip without the distractions of ads or viewer comments.

If you dislike displaying a bookmarks toolbar in your browser, you can save these bookmarklets as plain bookmarks. Call them up quickly when you're browsing by assigning keywords — for instance, qtube, read.

(found via Daring Fireball and 43 Folders Clips)

comments: 3

Genevieve Netz said...

I installed the Readability bookmarklet to see if I will use it. In trade, I'll offer the Dict add-on for Firefox. It's a very useful dictionary and thesaurus tool.

Matt Thomas said...

I've been using both of these for the past couple weeks or so. (Hadn't thought about using them in the classroom though.) My hesitance to publicize them, however, stems from a feeling that if they get too popular, offending websites will catch on and circumvent them. When something's good, sometimes I don't want anyone to know about it.

Michael Leddy said...

Thanks for Dict, Genevieve. That one's new to me.

Matt, I know what you mean. I hope these bookmarklets stay around for a while.