This post covers another fun way to use your Gmail account – collecting and organizing your daily reading list using your Gmail inbox.

Easily Email Any Article To Yourself

Google Chrome : “Email This Page”

Email this page lets you quickly compose an email by grabbing the page title and the text you have selected on the page. You can therefore highlight the main idea of the page and then easily remember why you decided to send this one to your reading list.

It can also be set up to always use the Gmail interface to compose a new message – even if you have another mail client by default.

It’s an official extension by Google but it did seem to have some bugs. On some pages it refused to send me to the “compose mail” screen and just did nothing. I hope that’s just a temporal glitch.

FireFox : Email Yourself!

This is an excellent addon just for these purposes. Unlike the Google Chrome extension, it won’t make you type in your own email address each time.

It allows you to email yourself the link, title, and selected text of the page you are viewing using Gmail. After having it installed, just click a toolbar icon or use the keyboard shortcut and a new Gmail message will be created with the page details.

Keyboard Shortcuts

• For Windows and Linux Users: ALT+Windows+Tilde (~)
• For Mac Users: Options+Command+Tilde (~)

Before using the extension, you’ll need to edit the two preferences:

• Enter your gmail address.
• Enter a personal identification message (used as a suffix for your email subject). By default it’s set to “-Sent via Email Yourself!”. In our case, this might be “TO READ LATER” or something similar.

Alternative FireFox Addon: Mozilla F1 (with Gmail support).

Any Browser : Notes For Later

Notes For Later sends the highlighted text, link, and time you accessed the page to your email. It works via browser bookmarklet. Each bookmarklet is unique and can be generated for your browser separately after you register.

Once you click a bookmarklet, it will let you enter a short note or just send the article right away:

The app will send you the link together with details as well as the PDF of the page content (for offline reading).

Alternative App For Various Browsers (Including Mobile Browsers): JoliPrint

Organize Your Gmail Reading List

We receive lots of email messages daily, so how do you effectively organize your Gmail reading list? Gmail filters work best for this!

First, create a new label called “READING LIST” and filter your emailed links to get labeled automatically (and probably skip the inbox to avoid any clutter).

For “Email this Page“- and “Email Yourself“-type of extensions (that let you email links to yourself), you’ll need to set up a filter for all mail coming from yourself to yourself:

For “Notes For Later“-types of tools (that email you from their official email accounts), filter all mail by their email address:

Now just let all the filtered mail go to your new label while skipping the inbox:

Once you have read an item in your list, you can unstar the email to mark it as done.

Have you ever used your email as a reading list organizer? Please share your tips in the comments!

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There are hundreds of bookmarklets and each can complete a different task. In this article I want to show you 6 bookmarklets that can help boost your web surfing speed by providing direct access to some of the best productivity services and time saving tools on the net.

1. Spreeder

Drag and drop this to your bookmarks: Spreed!

The Internet is all about information and a lot of it is delivered in the form of text. Spreeder will help you read faster. Simply select text you want to read and click the bookmarklet. The text will load in the speed reader application. When you hit play, your text will be displayed one word at a time. You can change the speed and size via the > Settings.

If this bookmarklet sounds interesting, you might also want to look at this article: 3 Ways You Can Learn To Speed Read Online.

2. Readability

Drag and drop this to your bookmarks: Readability

So the speed reader is not for you, but with your regular reading you’re constantly distracted by ads and images and the fonts are always too small? You need a bookmarklet that auto-edits your texts to make it easier to read!

Your solution is Readability. Simply click the bookmarklet and your text will be converted into a format that makes it a delight to read. You can try it right away with this article!

You’ll find more information about Readbility here: 2 Useful Bookmarklets To Make Your Web Reading Easier.

UPDATE : Unfortunately, it appears that the Readability bookmarklet was discontinued shortly after this article was composed. However, there is an alternative to Readability, called Readable. In fact, Readable is a great alternative as it allows you to greatly customize your reading experience. Thank you very much Elmar for suggesting it.

3. Instapaper

Drag and drop this to your bookmarks: Instapaper

If you frequently save articles to read them later, I recommend using Instapaper. Not only will you have access to your ‘read later’ material from anywhere with an Internet connection, you can also speed-bookmark material with the Instapaper bookmarklet.

For more information about Instapaper, check out this article: Manage Your Bookmarks & Reading List with Instapaper.

4. Evernote

Drag and drop this to your bookmarks: Evernote

Evernote is a fantastic tool for saving anything and everything: notes, ideas, text snippets, videos, pictures etc. One thing that makes it so great is its advanced search functionality. With the Evernote bookmarklet, saving bits and pieces becomes a bliss.

Not yet familiar with Evernote? Find out about it here:

• Become a Rockstar Note Taker with Evernote
• Evernote – The Killer App For The Android Mobile Phone
• 7 Ways To Make Use Of Evernote
• 6 Ways To Add Your Information To Evernote

5. BugMeNot

Drag and drop this to your bookmarks: BugMetNot

Are you tired having to sign up for every other website and does it take too long? Try BugMetNot to quickly receive login information for websites that force you to log in.

An alternative to BugMetNot is Login2. Drag and drop this to your bookmarks: Login2

6. Bookmarklet Combiner

Demo: Speed Bookmarklets

Now that you have a little list of great bookmarklets, how about combining them all into one? With Bookmarklet Combiner you can take multiple URLs or bookmarklets and unite them into a single bookmarklet. This is a non-typical bookmarklet, as you have to configure it yourself before you can drag and drop it into your bookmarks bar. The demo above combines all bookmarklets introduced in this article.

For a thorough walkthrough that explains how to use this tool, check out this article: Combine All Your Bookmarklets Into One with Bookmarklet Combiner.

We have previously featured selected bookmarklets on MakeUseOf:

• 3 Easy Bookmarklets To Print Nice Looking Web Pages Without Craplets
• Tweak Your Daily Searching With These Browser Bookmarklets
• 5 Recommended Bookmarklets To Simplify Tedious Tasks
• 9 Bookmarklets To Instantly View Your To-Do Tasks on Remember The Milk
• 20 Must-Have Bookmarklets For Your Web Browser

What are your most used bookmarklets and which one is your favorite from the list above?

Image credits: Igor Shikov

In this article I will introduce you to three URL shortening tools that work with either Firefox or Chrome or any other browser that supports javascript bookmarklets. So whatever browser is your favorite, there is a handy URL shortening tool that will work for you.

Cutyfox (Firefox)

Cutyfox is a Firefox extension ‘made in Germany’ that currently supports the URL shortening services is.gd, bit.ly, goo.gl, and mcaf.ee as well as the native URL shorteners of Flickr, YouTube, and Amazon (plus shorteners).

Per default, the extension sits to the left of the URL bar, symbolized by a pair of scissors. Clicking it will shorten the current URL and automatically copy it to the clipboard.

Via the Cutyfox Options menu, accessible through the Firefox list of extensions, the tool can be customized, for example to show the button in the address bar or status bar, to use a different shortening service, or disable the auto-copy to clipboard feature.

An alternative to Cutyfox is Shorten URL, a Firefox addon that supports over 100 URL shorteners. The problem is that it still lists a lot of sites that have since discontinued their service.

goo.gl (Chrome)

Google’s URL shortener is simply ingenious. Its button sits in between other installed Google Chrome extensions to the right of the smartbar. Once clicked, the URL of the present tab is shortened and automatically copied to the clipboard.

Along with a short URL, goo.gl also creates a QR code and provides further details on an information page for the short URL.

Additional options can be configured via the extension settings menu, for example adding services to share shortened URLs with, adjusting preferences, or managing keyboard shortcuts. The goo.gl URL shortener is also available in a lite version, which comes without keyboard shortcuts and context menu.

bitly (All Browsers)

If you use neither Firefox nor Chrome or both interchangeably and would prefer to use the same tool in both, check out the bitly sidebar bookmarklet. This little javascript-powered tool lives in your bookmarks bar.

To shorten a URL, click the bookmarklet and the sidebar will launch with the open tab’s URL pasted in and automatically shortened. All you have to do is click > Copy next to the shortened link. If you wish to shorten a different link, simply paste it into the URL field, click the > Shorten button, and then > Copy the URL to your clipboard.

You do not have to create an account to use bitly. However, if you do, you will be able to analyze and keep track of your links.

The above is only a small selection of the most easy and quick to use URL shorteners. There are many more services that may come in handy in special situations, for example the following ones that have also been profiled in the MakeUseOf Directory:

• Mgnet.me – Shorten Magnet Links
• isNSFW – Not Safe For Work URL Shortener
• Fur.ly – Shorten multiple URLs into one

The downside of URL shortening is that it can hide the revealing path to a malicious website. For this reason, we have recently introduced you to 5 Browser Extensions To Expand Shortened URLs.

How often do you use URL shortening and do you ever re-use your shortened URLs or do you just create a new short link?

Image credits: YellowPixel

But now a simple and highly useful Safari extension appropriately called SendTab is just the solution to this problem. Simply put, SendTab allows you to send a selected webpage to one or more computers on your network. When it arrives on the remote computer, it automatically downloads in your networked web browser. It happens within seconds.

The only downside to the extension is that you can only send URLs from iOS devices, but not to them. The extension works both ways using Chrome, but you can only, for some reason, send URLs from Firefox to Safari – not the other way around. In other words, this extension works best if you’re a Safari or Chrome user.

SendTab Setup

Perhaps I misunderstood the instructions, but I initially had problems setting up the SendTab network on my computers, and I noticed a few other users complained as well. What I figured out is that after you download and install the SendTab extension, you need to create a Network account. The registration page ask for a “Network Name.” It sounds like a name that you need to locate on your computer, but it’s not. It simply means a “sign-in” name – you can put whatever name you like and will remember, and then create a password.

After you have logged into your account, sign in again on your other computer and/or iOS device.

When you link to your network account, your computers – but not your iOS device – should be listed. Otherwise they will not receive the URLs you send to them. Basically your URLs are sent to your account and then forwarded over to your computers on your network.

iOS Bookmarklet

To send URLs from your iPad or iPhone, you need to add a bookmarklet to the Safari web browser on your device. There are instructions for setting up the bookmarklet, but that might be a tad bit confusing as well. Here are the steps to install the bookmarklet on your iOS device:

• In Safari on your iOS device, link to the SendTab page and click on the SendTab link on the left side of the page, right above the instructions.

• Save the SendTab bookmark in Bookmarks.
• Now open the the Bookmarks page and tap the Edit button. Now tap on the SendTab bookmark to edit its existing URL.

• Select the entire SendTab URL and paste in the bookmarklet code and javascript code, replacing the original URL.

• Click the Done button and exit out of Bookmarks.
• Copy all the javascript code in step 2 of the instructions on that page.
• Tap the Export button on your iOS device and select “Add Bookmark”. (in the SendTab website instructions, it says “+” button, but I believe that refers to the older version of iOS.)

Now you can send URLs from your iOS device to your designated computer(s) on your network. A SendTab box will appear after you tap the bookmarklet in your device. You may have to scroll up to the top of the selected webpage to tap the SendTab window.

SendTab works well for what it does, though it could use a few more features. Sent pages automatically open in the computer you send them to. If your remote computer is asleep when a URL is sent, it may take a few seconds for the webpage to download after the computer is awakened. It would be useful if a Growl notification would appear when URLs are sent and received by SendTab. Also, once a URL is sent, there’s no option to keep it from being download in the remote computer it was sent to.

These are just minor issues with SendTab, an extension utility that quite frankly should be built into Safari itself, especially since many Mac users work between one or more computers.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com

Citebite and Awesome Highlighter are the web apps that satisfy our double requirements of simplicity and utility.

Yes, you might compare Citebite and Awesome Highlighter to some of the other bookmarking and annotating tools that are crowding the web each day. Most prominently, you can compare it with the online bookmarking Diigo. These two may not be killer apps just yet, but they have some things going for it. Let’s dive into Citebite and Awesome Highlighter and see them in action.

An Example of Citebite in Action

Let’s take a sample webpage and put Citebite through its paces. Here’s a section that I liked from an article on Zen Habits that I wanted to share with some friends. All I have to do is  -

Select that chunk of text and past it in the first field on the Citebite page.

In the second field, copy-paste the URL of the webpage.

Click on Make Citebite to get the unique URL. As the screen below shows, this is what is displayed.

Send it across to your friends. When your friends click on the Citebite link, it takes them to a cached version of the page on Citebite’s own server. The important section is highlighted in yellow for reference.

The cached page preserves the entire webpage as it is and you can browse through it normally. The advantage of serving a copy of the original page is that even if the original page is removed or there is a downtime, you and your circle gets to view the page with the annotated chunk of information. You can bookmark this page as any other normal webpage.

Citebite makes available a bookmarklet and a Firefox extension that makes linking to a section of a webpage a quick one-two click job.

An Example of Awesome Highlighter in Action

Awesome Highlighter also lets you highlight specific part of a webpage and then gives you a link that points to it. But it goes a step further by also letting you register and save your highlighted pages. We have covered it before but it’s worth a second look.

Enter the URL of the webpage and Awesome Highlighter displays the page with the highlighting toolbar on top. Use the pen to highlight the relevant passage and click on Done. You can also add a small note to the highlighted text for reference.

The automatically generated link takes you to the highlighted and annotated page.

Awesome Highlighter also provides a Firefox Add-on and a bookmarklet. But it also gives us a few extras like the option to register and view all our highlighted pages. Plus, the stats page lets you know how many people viewed your marked text.

Awesome Highlighter also makes it easier to share with the options as shown in the screen.

Uses of Citebite and Awesome Highlighter

Using the highlight and link function straight from your browser, you can quickly share relevant sections with others. It’s a time-saver for collaborative teams.

Highlighting relevant portions of long and text heavy articles and linking them turns them into quick and easy research tools.

Citebite and Awesome Highlighter can be used by educators and students for annotating and sharing parts of web pages.

These two free web apps could also be time-saving tools to highlight errors and typos on webpages. Instead of taking a screenshot or emailing the error, a direct Citebite link to the error could do.

Citebite and Awesome Highlighter are simple tools. But where would you place them in the wide and varied pantheon of annotation tools? Tell us about the tool you use to annotate web pages on the go.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Rather than just printing everything or using copy&paste to create a custom document for printing, you can be smart and use one of the bookmarklet tools I will introduce below. A bookmarklet typically is a little javascript utility that sits in your browser bookmarks bar and does its magic once you click it. The following bookmarklets can help you cut all the junk out of a website and print a nice looking version.

Bookmarklets work in any browser. Typically, you drag and drop it from a button on a website into your bookmarks bar. In Internet Explorer you right-click the button and select > Add to Favorites.

Joliprint

This applet will automatically strip elements from a website that are known to be superfluous. If you have your own website, but can’t be bothered to set up a print option, you can add a Joliprint button instead.

When you see the button on a website or have the bookmarklet in your bookmarks, all you need to do is click it and wait while Joliprint prepares your document.

When your PDF is ready, you can download, open, and print it. Or you can share it via Facebook, Twitter, Email, or by using the provided link.

The screenshot below shows an excerpt from the PDF.

The downside obviously is that you cannot customize the page in any way. You have to trust that Joliprint knows what it’s doing. On the other hand it’s fast and painless.

PrintWhatYouLike

PrintWhatYouLike lets you fully customize a page and print it directly or save it as a document. PrintWhatYouLike also offers a printer friendly button for your website.

To launch the PWYL editor, click the button or bookmarklet and wait a second. To isolate, remove, widen, resize, or save only selected items, simply click them in the website on the right and select the respective option from the little menu that opens up. You can select more than one element at once and apply the action to all of them at once.

You will also notice a sidebar on the left hand side of the website you are editing. In addition to manipulating single items, it allows you to change the default text size and font, remove the background, all images and margins, as well as undo and redo changes. A shortcut is to click Auto Format, which yields a text only version of the website.

Once you’re happy with the result, you can print the website directly or save it as PDF or HTML.

PrintFriendly

Among the bookmarklets introduced here, I find PrintFriendly to be the most user friendly solution because it unites all of the best features of Joliprint and PrintWhatYouLike. If you agree, you might want to get not only the bookmarklet, but also the button for your website.

Once again, visit a website you wish to print and click the bookmarklet. When the PrinterFriendly document preview opens, you will find that all the usual suspects have already been stripped: sidebars, ads, menu bars etc.

You can now go ahead and remove anything else you don’t want to see in your final document. Mouseover the respective element and ‘click to delete‘.

When you’re done you can either print, save as PDF or email the document.

MakeUseOf has profiled several similar tools in the Directory:

• The Printliminator: Print Only What You Want.
• iWeb2Print: Convert Webpages to Print Friendly PDFs.
• Web2PDF: Convert Web Pages To PDF Instantly.
• Readable: Convert Websites To Text Only Friendly Version.

Also check out the article How To Print A Web Page The Way You Want It and 2 Useful Bookmarklets To Make Your Web Reading Easier.

I highly recommend you save interesting articles to PDF for reference. This way you can also transfer them to your eReader, rather than printing them and wasting paper and ink. Besides, the file on your eReader will last longer than sheets of paper.

Image credits: vladis torms

I have already shared a few FireFox addons to recover forms. However times have changed. Nowadays more and more people use several browsers randomly and we need some cross-browser-compatible tools to cover everyone’s needs.

The browser-based tools listed in this post have only some basic functionality but they are able to make your forms more usable and friendly! Besides, these web form helpers are all very easy to install, so you can test any and decide if that’s something that could turn useful to you. Let us know!

Save and Recover Forms

1. Simple Form Fixer (Greasemonkey Userscript)

Tested on: FireFox and Google Chrome

Simple Form Fixer is a nice little userscript with huge functionality: it can save and recover almost any form. The script places a red dot in the top-left corner of any page that lets you record any form:

• The icon is a red dot for web pages where there are sufficient form items to be useful for saving (If you can’t see an icon, there are no forms on the current page);
• The icon is a red square with a hole on web pages where you have already saved the form information earlier.

You can also hover over the icon to see the current status:

You can actually easily get used to how it works. The icon stays within the window frame even when the page has been scrolled down.

Once you click the red dot, the script saves everything it can find: checkboxes, radio buttons, text inputs, drop down selections and text areas.

The script also changes all the checkboxes making them a bit larger and thus easier to notice (especially for elderly people or people with poor eyesight). If you don’t like that, you can disable this behavior in about:config by setting value “greasemonkey.scriptvals.userscripts.org/Simple Form Saver.fixed_sizes” to boolean true.

2. Save and Recover Forms (Bookmarklets)

Tested on: FireFox, Google Chrome, Opera

Install the bookmarklet from here (forms should be max ~3KB)

Once you fill in all the forms on the current page, click the bookmarklet and give each form a name. Next time you are on page and want to recover any form, click the other bookmarklet, specify the form name and it will fill it in within a second.

Check / Uncheck Multiple Checkboxes

3. Checkbox Mate

Tested on: FireFox, Google Chrome

Checkbox Mate (based on this addon which is no longer supported) is a great userscript that allows you to select multiple checkboxes by drawing a box around them. To start drawing the box, hover over the top checkbox and drag down (the same logic works for un-checking boxes):

4. Check Boxes

Tested on: FireFox, Google Chrome

This is a very simple userscript that adds a menu on top of your screen allowing you to easily check / uncheck all the boxes located on the page:

5. Tick All / Untick All / (Un) Tick All (Bookmarklets)

Tested on: FireFox, Google Chrome, Opera

Three bookmarklets from the same author as the above two – can be installed from here

As the name suggests the three bookmarklets can be used to check / uncheck multiple boxes with one click of a mouse.

I hope these little form helpers will increase your productivity. Please share any other form productivity tips you use to easier fill in multiple web forms we have to deal with nowadays!

Image Credit: cc licensed flickr photo shared by axbom

To give general web users a better reading and writing environment, Readability – one of the pioneers in web reading technology – has rolled out its new version. This new Readability focuses not only on the readers, but also on web publishers.

From Bookmarklets To Add-Ons

Basically, web services like Readability will convert any webpage into a more read-friendly format. To know more about the concept, let’s watch this short introduction video.

The old version of Readability relied on a Javascript bookmarklet for the conversion. Users would install the bookmarklet on their browser’s bookmark bar, and every time they wanted to have a more read-friendly version of a webpage, they would have pressed the bookmarklet.

Even though the bookmarklet is still functional, the New Readability utilizes browser add-ons to carry out the conversion task. To get the add on for your browser, click the “Get the Add-On” button on Readability’s main page.

The site will detect what browser you use and give you the download link accordingly.

After the download is finished, install the add-on. In my experiment, the Safari version of the Readability add-on required a manual installation.

After a quick installation, the Readability add-on button will appear next to the URL field.

You can enable or disable the add-on from the Preferences window.

Using The Add-On

To see the differences between the old and new version of Readability, I opened a MakeUseOf page and pressed the Readability button. The article page was quickly converted into a clean, easy-to-read page. But so far, it’s more or less similar to the old version.

The big difference is in the tool sidebar. Along with the familiar “Reload” and “Print” buttons, the new version also gives users tools to quickly change the page layout according to their preferences. Click one of the boxes under “Font & Color” and the layout will change into a pre-defined layout.

The tool will also let users quickly change the width of the text area and also the font size, which is useful if you have sight problems.

If you prefer clean text for your articles, Readability lets you “convert links to footnotes“. No more blue-underlined text as every link will now go to the end of the article. You can also hide the images within the article if you want to.

Another additional feature on the sidebar is the sharing button. Now you can easily share the article that you are currently reading via Twitter, Email and Facebook. Readability goes one step further by providing you with a shortened URL of the article.

More Publisher Friendly

The problem with most services like Readability is that they are not publisher friendly. Stripping down a webpage into the clean, easy-to-read format also means stripping out all of the publisher’s income.

To solve this problem, Readability offers a paid subscription model to its users. Subscribers can choose how much money they are willing to pay every month (with the minimum amount being US$ 5.00). Readability will then give 70% of the money to writers and publishers, while keeping the remaining 30% to maintain and improve the service.

To make the offer more compelling, paid subscribers will get more features compared to free users, such as the ability to save articles to read later and also mobile access to the saved articles.

If you are a writer or publisher and you want to participate in the program, you can add the “Reading Buttons” on your website(s). Adding the buttons is as easy as embedding the provided script.

Also don’t forget to register your site to join the “Readability movement“.

As a reader, I think the New Readibility is way better than the old one. Especially with the addition of quick layout and sharing tools. As a writer, I think the paid subscription model offered by Readibility might be one of the solutions to provide readers with a more comfortable reading environment while keeping that environment publisher friendly.

What do you think about the New Readability? Share your thoughts and opinions using the comments below.

Image credit: the bbp