Managing Bookmarklets, Not Bookmarks, With Blummy

Bookmarklets, as you may remember, are small snippets of JavaScript that you save like bookmarks and click like bookmarks, but they provide some function. For example they may prompt you for a keyword and then perform a search for you, or resize a window, or something like that. Many of the online services nowadays offer their own bookmarklets to help with functionality. (Del.icio.us has a whole RAFT of them.)

With all these bookmarklets popping up, there's no surprise Blummy popped up. Blummy is sorta like a control panel for bookmarklets, and it's quite cool. You can try it at http://blummy.com/.

You can see what a Blummy panel looks like without registering, but to configure it to work for you you'll need to register. Registration requires a user name and password. Once you're registered, you'll get access to a configuration tool from which you can drag and drop "blumlets" to make your control panel. (Blumlets sounds like a side effect. May cause itching, abdominal pain, sore throat, and blumlets.) I noticed that once I had placed the blumets I had trouble clicking and dragging them to be relocated; reloading the page kept them in place and solved the problem.

There are 36 pages of available blumlets listed five at the time. A lot of these are ones you'd expect, like "Blog This", "Add to Del.icio.us", and so on, and of course plenty of search bookmarklets. But there are utilities too, and I rapidly made a panel that'll allow me to go to the Whois page for the domain I'm looking at, check page freshness, make a TinyURL, and go to the Wayback Machine for a given domain.

I made a panel with the drag and drop tool (if you're looking for more control, you do have the option of making your own blumlets and using the advanced mode to see the script for a given blumlet) and then dragged the blummy bookmarklet to my toolbar. Clicked on it there and ta-da -- I had a little control panel, with several useful utilities available immediately.

Not everything worked perfectly. The freshness check doesn't seem to work; it kept giving me today's date and time. Same for the pagerank tool; it ranked everything as zero. But the TinyURL, Wikipedia, Whois, and Wayback tools all worked fine. Blummy has a "rate" page where you can rank the blumlets you have used, and a forum where you can ask questions and report problems.

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