Editor's note: Russ McGuire is the online director of Business Reform Magazine. Each issue of Business Reform features practical advice on operating successfully in business while glorifying God.
I've fallen in love with bookmarklets. I first encountered these gems when I was learning to program in Javascript, but at the time, without any practical examples, I brushed the concept aside and hurried along. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been reintroduced to bookmarklets, and now I'm hooked. I think you will be too!
A couple of weeks ago, while randomly wandering around the web, I stumbled onto a blog discussion about LibraryLookup. LibraryLookup is a bookmarklet created by John Udell which allows you to quickly find out whether a book you're thinking about buying online is actually available for free from your local library. Since my family is probably the heaviest user of our local library, primarily because of our ability to find and request books from anywhere in the county-wide system through their web interface, this naturally caught my eye. So, I grabbed the bookmarklet and have been using it ever since.
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Let me back up. What is a bookmarklet? A bookmarklet looks and acts a lot like a link that you can click on in your web browser. But, instead of being an actual link, it is some Javascript code. Since Javascript can do lots of stuff based on the current webpage, bookmarklets can do all kinds of amazing things, based on what you're currently looking at in your web browser.
For example, the LibraryLookup bookmarklet looks at the web address (URL: universal resource locator) of the page in your browser and tries to find an ISBN number. If it finds something that looks like an ISBN number, then it grabs that number and uses it to search your local library using that ISBN number. Since websites like Amazon and Barnes and Noble usually provide better searching and a lot more information about specific books than library websites, and since Amazon and B&N use ISBNs in their URLs, LibraryLookup provides the best of both worlds. Great online information and free books (at least for a couple of weeks)!
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So - what do bookmarklets have to do with business? Well, I'm sure there are some bookmarklets out there that might be helpful to your business. If you're in the web design business, then there are a ton of useful bookmarklets. But, that's not my point.
If you have a website, and if you'd like potential customers to get in the habit of coming to your website, then bookmarklets may be the answer.
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For example, I've quickly developed two bookmarklets to demonstrate what I mean. These may only work with Internet Explorer. I developed them by modifying a Search Google bookmarklet I found on the web.
To try these out, either click and drag these to the "Links" portion of your browser toolbar (at the top), or right mouse click on them and select "Add to favorites". You might be warned that the link may not be safe, since it is actually software. I promise - these are safe (although I can't vouch for other bookmarklets). Select any word or phrase on any web page and then click on the bookmarklet. A new browser window will open with the results of the specified search in it.
Think about how people use your website. Would you like to make it even easier for people to come to your site as their first choice for that use?
If so, then maybe it's time to create a bookmarklet!
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Russ McGuire is Online Director for Business Reform. Prior to joining Business
Reform, Mr. McGuire spent over twenty years in technology industries, performing various roles from writing mission critical software for the nuclear power and defense industries to developing core business strategies in the telecom industry. Mr. McGuire is currently focused on helping businesspeople apply God's eternal truths to their real-world business challenges through Business Reform's online services. He can be reached at [email protected].
