Bookmarklets are probably one of the most useful things on the Internet today. A small trinket of code saved as a bookmark can enable you to perform some truly incredible tasks, which makes your web browsing a walk in the park. At MUO, we have covered bookmarklets like Printliminator, Readability and Quix, and your feedback has told us that they are just as useful as we make them out to be.

However, one serious problem with bookmarklets is the amount of space they take up. It’s OK if you have only a couple of bookmarklets lying around on your toolbar, but if you are a power user, you probably have tons of bookmarklets cramming up the entire width of your toolbar, thereby denying you from using the toolbar for other purposes.

Today, we will take a look at Bookmarklet Combiner, which enables a user to combine bookmarklets into one. The end result is one tiny little button, which will provide you with all the functionality that you need.

• First, go to the Bookmarklet Combiner website. You will be greeted with a simple, friendly interface, which you can use to combine bookmarklets.

What you need to do next is fetch the exact URL/code for each of the bookmarklets that you want to combine. You can do this in one of two ways.

• The first way is to go to the website from where you got the bookmarklet and copy the code from there.
• The second way (and much quicker) is to simply look up its properties from your browser. Just right-click whatever bookmarklet it is that you want to use and click on “Edit” or “Properties” or something similar. Then copy the URL/code to which the bookmarklet points.

In the example below, I’ve used all the bookmarklets that I normally use and pasted them into the Bookmarklet Combiner.

Next, you will want to select how you want to combine bookmarklets. Again, you have two options.

• The first one enables you to run all of them at once. This may be used to perform multiple actions on a page. For example, you could combine Readability and another bookmarklet that creates a PDF of the result using this method.
• The second method enables you to select individual items from a drop-down list. This is the option we are using for this example. You can also specify the location where you want the menu to be displayed.

• Finally, name your new bookmarklet. I like the name “X” as it is very minimalist in nature. As soon as you enter the name, your bookmarklet will show up at the bottom of the screen. Drag this bookmarklet to your toolbar to install it. And don’t forget to delete your old bookmarklets as you won’t be needing them anymore.

• You can click on the “Save” button at the bottom of the screen to permanently store your custom bookmarklet on the servers of Bookmarklet Combiner. This way, you can use a single URL to share your bookmarklet with the world.  Below you can see the result of our little handiwork.

Now that you know how to combine your bookmarklets, go ahead and have fun reducing all the clutter in your bookmarks toolbar. And if you come up with some particularly nice ways to combine bookmarklets, do share the URL with us in the comments.

Image Credit : Flickr.

Tagged: bookmarklets • browser tips