Hack the web: Bookmarklets

Ever visit a page and the web designer was probably smoking crack because the text colors they used matched perfectly with the background color which makes the webpage almost completely unreadable? How about visiting a page with a ton of ads all over the place?

We all have our annoyances while surfing the web, so the only thing you can do is… hack the web!

Maybe you’re thinking “I’m just a normal person, I saw the movie ‘Hackers’ what do I know from hacking the web?” No problem, the solution is a bookmarklet!

What’s a bookmarklet? Well, you know what a bookmark is right? When you find a webpage you like, you bookmark it so you can find it again later. A bookmarklet is like a bookmark but instead of storing a web address, you store some JavaScript code in it.

Don’t worry what JavaScript is, it’s just a nice little thing.

What a bookmarklet will do is give you the ability to change a webpage’s appearance.

trylookinghere.com has an AutoFill Anonymous function that will fill in every field with the word anonymous. Pretty handy for those websites that make you register all the time.

Jesse's Bookmarklets site has a lot of really useful bookmarklets – the Zap functions are very nice. Zap ads, colors, whatever. Makes checking your yahoo mail (if you still have a yahoo account you really should try gmail) nice.

SubSimple has some nice bookmarklets particularly the layout bookmarklets. You can remove ads, you can allow right-click for those websites that disable this mouse function.

For futher information visit Introduction to bookmarklets By Simon Willison

All you have to do to install a bookmarklet is to click on it and hold down your mouse button and then drag it up to your toolbar. Any changes the bookmarklet does can be reversed simply by hitting refresh! Have fun!