doms useful stuff

I've been using this for a long time and it's one of my favourite internet tools.

Living in the third world means many of the planet's awesome goodies are not available at the store around the corner. As a result I do a lot of internet shopping. 

Before this button when I saw a product I liked i would save it as a bookmark or copy it to one task list or another. Often it ended up lost or forgotten when I actually had the money or opportunity to buy something. 

This little button fixes all that:  

Try dragging it to your bookmark bar now. This awesome little piece of software is called a bookmarklet. I'll say some more about them at the end of the post.

Now, when I find something I like I just click on the button. A little window pops up (see photo below) that automatically pulls the product name, price and photo. Sometimes there are lots of photos on the page and it's not sure which one to grab but you can scroll through the photos by hitting the arrows below the thumbnail. Sometimes you have to enter the price as well. 

You can also choose which list to add it to if, like me, you have a couple of them. Now, when you login to amazon your item is there on your wishlist. Clicking on the link will take you back to the web page where your item is. 

So all your stuff is in one place and can be organized by category. Plus you can share your Amazon Wishlist with your friends (or enemies but that's less useful). 

Here are the actual Amazon instructions at http://www.amazon.com/wishlist/get-button#

View your Wish List

Get the Universal Wish List Button It's the essential tool for adding items from any website to your Amazon Wish Lists.

Just drag this button to the bookmarks bar in your web browser, then click "OK" when prompted to select a name for the bookmark.  Don't worry if you see a  symbol as you move it across your screen.

As promised, more about bookmarklets:

A bookmarklet goes where bookmarks go but instead of taking you to a page when you click on it it does something. There are tons of them and they make websurfing ten times as awesome. I know because I measured with my awesometer (aw-som-iter).

Google bookmarklets or go to my main resource for them, Jesse's Bookmarklets. I don't know if Jesse's the best but it was first set I found and he/she has lots of them. 

I'll do a full post on them some other time but I've included some of my favourite's below. You can drag and drop them to your browser from this post if you want. Just highlight the whole link and drag it to your bookmark's bar.

-google site search - By far my most used bookmarklet. Click on it to search an entire domain for text. Say you remember seeing an article on a website but you can't find it. Click on this bookmarklet and it will open a dialog box where you enter your text. It will search the entire website for the term and spit out a Google search results page with links to every web page where the text appears. You can also highlight text before you click and it will search for that. It's great for searching The Tribune and The Nassau Guardian since their search engines will turn up zero results for the letter e. 

-Pauses and unpauses Flash movies. Details

-Increases the last number in the URL by 1. Details This one I can't drop directly into the post so click details to go get it if you want. It's great for moving through multiple pages but it's most useful for the following scenario: You are on a page that has links to a bunch of something. In this case we'll say photos. When you click on the photo it opens in another page where the photo is the only item on the page. Now you have got to go back to the original page to open the next one. Annoying right? 

No more! Just click this button and it will take you to the next page. It works by increasing the number in the webpage address (url). So you can see if it will work by glancing up at the url. If it ends with a number then it should work. 

That is all.