Did you like the last post? Well, whether it was useful to you or not, what is worth noting about it is that it only took me about 15 minutes to produce.
A list of 83 targeted links in 15 minutes?
Finding the underlying links was relatively simple - a few well crafted google searches, along with information provided from most of the site's pages yields many of the links, but what about copying and reformatting them for this site?
Enter Bookmarklets
Bookmarklets are small javascript functions embedded within a link, which you can save to your browser links bar. Once saved, when you click the bookmark, the javascript within it will run in the context of the current page you are browsing. This creates some very interesting possibilities, but essentially think of it as being able to run anay javascript you like on any site on the web.
For my purposes, I developed two scripts to make it simple to extract links from pages, which you can copy and install below:
Installation Instructions
For Internet Explorer:
Right Click the link, select "Add To Favorites" - this may prompt a security warning (it's just javascript, you can examine it yourself if you are concerned), OK the warning, then save to your Links folder/toolbar
For Firefox / Chrome:
Simply drag the link onto your browser's links toolbar
With the two bookmarklets installed, you can now use them -
LinksList
Linklist creates a bulleted list (UL) of all the links within a highlighted area of any webpage - simply highlight an area of links and click the button, and it will extract just the links and their link text - no surrounding text / layout or custom styles / properties. I used this to extract links quickly and without proprietary styles.
LinkCount
Obviously the last post had an exact count of how many links were in it, it would be pretty boring / time consuming to tot all those up, so a quick modification to the LinksList script yields LinkCount, which runs in a similiar way - just select a range of links, then click LinkCount to see how many links you've selected.
With these two simple scripts in your toolbar, you can assemble link-list style posts much quicker. Enjoy.
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