sarka

Yesterday night, I went to a party, during which some guests commented on the readability of other guests' LJ layouts, which prompted me to blurt out: "But why don't you just ZAP IT?"

Which prompted a few questions of the "Whaaaa?" variety, and I ended up promising to make this post.

Now, here's your standard introduction, if you have no idea where I'm going with this: These are bookmarklets. Basically, you drag and drop them wherever you keep your bookmarks - in my case, I keep the two I use the most directly on the Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox, and the rest in a folder on said toolbar which is aptly named "Zappers". Basically, these are little javascript buttons that you hit and they do all sorts of nifty things.

My most frequently used bookmarklet comes from this site: Bookmarklets for Zapping annoyances. The one I use the most from there is "Zap Colors", which is also, hands down, the most frequently pressed button on my computer screen. It turns backgrounds white and text black, and links go blue and purple. From that site, I also use "Force Wrap", which fixes sites that are distorted by long words (everybody hates scrolling sideways!), "Linearize", which does what it says on the tin and "Zap White Backgrounds" which turns your backgrounds tan - I use it with Zap Colours when my eyes are tired. They also have "Zap Images", which replaces all images with their alternate text - great for pretending you're working when you're really reading your friendslist!

My second and third most frequently used bookmarklets, however, come from here: Murklins @ talkoncorners.net. Drag the first link and drop them on your toolbar, and you can display any and all LJ pages in the style of your LJ with the click of a button. This one is a LIFESAVER.

The next one down changes the mode on any given post so that instead of displaying comments, it's set to "Reply". I use this for two reasons: When I hit this button, I can do a "Select All" and save all the text of the site into a .txt document for later perusal on my Mp3 player, without having to save a gazillion comments and also, sometimes I'm worried about spoilers in comments.

I also have the third one off that site in my "Zappers" folder, but I barely ever use it.

Possibly my favourite bookmarklet, though, is found here: To Read. I hit a button, and it sends the site to me in an email so that I can remember to read it later. I also have the ToRead+, which lets me send myself a comment with the link! It's BRILLIANT for people like me whose ToDo lists are freaking endless and who are always on the run and don't always have time or patience to troll through their saved tabs later.

felisblanco, I told you there was a bookmarklet that would zap text to light on dark background; if you put your "Style" setting at Readability to "Terminal", you get light text on a darkish green background.

Readability is awesome because you can fiddle with it a lot to get it to display exactly the results you want - because not everything is on Livejournal, after all, and can be fixed with a "style=mine" tag - you can change the style, the size and the margin width, and once you're happy with your settings, all you have to do is drag and drop the resulting button. In fact, I have two different Readability buttons; one with Medium font, one with Large font, and the Large font is set in the eBook style. The extra super cool thing about Readability is that when Readability has loaded your stripped page, the resulting page has three buttons in the top left corner of the site, the first of which takes you back to the original look without reloading, the second prints the result and the third lets you email the text of the page - and only the text - to someone else, or yourself.

There's also other nifty things I never use.

Now! Go forth and ZAP THINGS.