SLinks

As you know if you read Slaw with any regularity, on Fridays I compile a list of links used during the week by posters and those commenting. This is not as easy to do as it ought to be, and I’ve used various methods all of which are somewhat tedious. Then I happened across a “bookmarklet” — i.e. a small piece of Javascript that gets used like a bookmark, usually from the bookmarks or favourites toolbar — that went some way to easing the task. It strips links from a page and puts them, along with their associated text, into table format.

I thought this might be handy for others. Sometimes when doing research I want to grab all the links on a page for later study. I could save the page itself in html format, of course, but often I don’t want all the text, just the links.

I’ve modified the bookmarklet somewhat to make it more usable and dubbed it SLinks. It will take the links and the link text from a page to which it is applied and put them into a two-column table in a new page. You can then either save that page as an html file for later use, or simply minimize it and use it later in the same work session.

It should work in both Firefox and IE. Please do let me know if I’m wrong in that, or if it fails in any way. It’s not perfect (yet?) because it sometimes leaves a great swath of white space above the table.

By the way, it won’t work when a window has frames, which means, e.g., it won’t work directly in QL. But all you have to do is convert the left frame in a QL window — the list of search results — into a window of its own and then apply SLinks to that window. (You make the conversion by right clicking in the left frame and using the contextual menu that appears to view the frame in its own window.)

To make SLinks your own, follow the link at the end of this sentence to the Resources page. I’ve put it there because if it gets applied to a page on which it lives, the Javascript becomes confused and screws up, and I know the first thing you’ll do is apply it to Slaw: SLinks