Bookmarklets for testing your website

I’m at day two of Indie Web Camp Brighton.

Day one was excellent. It was really hard to choose which sessions to go to because they all sounded interesting. That’s a good problem to have.

I ended up participating in:

  • a session on POSSE,
  • a session on NFC tags,
  • a session on writing, and
  • a session on testing your website that was hosted by Ros

In that testing session I shared some of the bookmarklets I use regularly.

Bookmarklets? They’re bookmarks that sit in the toolbar of your desktop browser. Just like any other bookmark, they’re links. The difference is that these links begin with javascript: rather than http. That means you can put programmatic instructions inside the link. Click the bookmark and the JavaScript gets executed.

In my mind, there are two different approaches to making a bookmarklet. One kind of bookmarklet contains lots of clever JavaScript—that’s where the smart stuff happens. The other kind of bookmarklet is deliberately dumb. All they do is take the URL of the current page and pass it to another service—that’s where the smart stuff happens.

I like that second kind of bookmarklet.

Here are some bookmarklets I’ve made. You can drag any of them up to the toolbar of your browser. Or you could create a folder called, say, “bookmarklets”, and drag these links up there.

Validation: This bookmarklet will validate the HTML of whatever page you’re on.

Validate HTML

Carbon: This bookmarklet will run the domain through the website carbon calculator.

Calculate carbon

Accessibility: This bookmarklet will run the current page through the Website Accessibility Evaluation Tools.

WAVE

Performance: This bookmarklet will take the current page and it run it through PageSpeed Insights, which includes a Lighthouse test.

PageSpeed

HTTPS: This bookmarklet will run your site through the SSL checker from SSL Labs.

SSL Report

Headers: This bookmarklet will test the security headers on your website.

Security Headers

Drag any of those links to your browser’s toolbar to “install” them. If you don’t like one, you can delete it the same way you can delete any other bookmark.

Responses

Juhis

@adactio Bookmarklets are great, I use a variety of them all the time! Thanks for sharing yours.

# Posted by Juhis on Sunday, March 10th, 2024 at 11:33am

alex.kirk.at

Jeremy Keith posted about bookmarklets that he uses for testing websites where he specifically likes those that just pass on the current URL to a service. Those bookmarklets typically have a structure like:

javascript:location.href='https://example.com?s='+escape(location.href)

I use those for my Friends WordPress plugin, too. That’s the one where you can follow people via RSS or ActivityPub and see the feed in a private section of your blog or even in Mastodon apps.

A screenshot of my WordPress tools section.

So, to follow the current website, you’d click on a bookmarklet like this:

javascript:location.href='https://example.com?add-friend='+escape(location.href)

I have another WordPress plugin called Post Collection, where you can save articles to your blog. Both to be able to search them later, or, with my Send to E-Reader plugin, to send them to your favorite reading device as a compiled e-book with chapters. Although the bookmarklet that you’d typically install has some logic to post the whole current page body so that it also works on non-public posts, there is also a version that looks like this:

javascript:location.href='https://example.com?user=123&collect-post='+escape(location.href)

One particularly nice thing about these style of bookmarklets, is that while unfortunately they don’t (or didn’t?) work on Firefox Mobile, you can use an Android app called URL Forwarder to share a URL from any other app which comes in quite handy when you use other apps to discover interesting content (such as awesome the Glider app for Hacker News).

I have only added my two bookmarklets here, but most of the ones Jeremy mentioned could also be added.

By the way, I have some history with bookmarklets. In 2005, I created a bookmarklet manager called Blummy. It’s still alive but dormant (ping me if you want to try it, signups have been spammed to death).

Bookmarklets have come out of fashion but were very important back then. I wished browsers would support them better and make installing them a little less awkward. They are always like a little swiss army knife to me.

# Monday, March 11th, 2024 at 4:04pm

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4 years ago I wrote Diversity and inclusion on the Clearleft podcast

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10 years ago I wrote Inlining critical CSS for first-time visits

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12 years ago I wrote Slow glass

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15 years ago I wrote South by Twenty Ten

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23 years ago I wrote Fame at last

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23 years ago I wrote Creationists in Gateshead

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