I’ve got a number of bookmarklets I use quite frequently that I find very useful. I thought I’d mention them here. Each page I point to has a link you can drag to your bookmark bar so that you can use them on the current webpage easily. They should work in all browsers.

Readability:

This takes a crowded webpage and prunes it down to the most important content (strips out ads, sidebars), and formats using your favourite font and size.

• video demonstration
• setup

Awesome Highlighter:

When you want to share only a small section of a webpage, this allows you to highlight certain text, so that it is easier for the viewer to find the main point.

• sample page with Primus highlighted
• setup

Bit.ly:

This one I use for twitter exclusively. It gives you a small URL before you copy it into your twitter client, so the URL length does not count against your 140 characters. I’ve highlighted the relevant link on the side using ‘Awesome Highlighter’ (just so that you can see the genuine utility of that service).

• setup

Youtube downloading:

This one downloads an h.264 mp4 movie file which is playable in Quicktime, for the current youtube video. It does not convert the flash files to mp4 videos. It downloads an alternate version that youtube has stored (it is the one that gets served up on the iPhone which has a h.264 hardware decoder). You may have an older version of this bookmarklet which requires 3 or 4 clicks to download, but this new one only requires clicking the bookmarklet and downloading starts. This is useful if you want to store youtube videos on your computer for later viewing, or if you want to queue up a sequence of videos.

• setup