So I’m at work, and I’m doing research…about gaming and blogging…Just kidding! I’m honestly doing technical research, but some of these web sites look fun and goofy with colored backgrounds, funky images, and text colors. They don’t look serious, and they give me guilty pangs when a co-worker walks by behind me. If I were reading plain, boring-looking pages, I wouldn’t feel so bad.
Introducing Bookmarklets for Zapping Annoyances to the rescue - easy to install, simply drag these bookmarklets (the grey squares) onto your browser’s bookmarks toolbar like so:
Feel free to try them out, but of course, pay attention to the browser compatibility. I will demo these three: zap colors, zap images, and linearize. So take a silly, fun-looking website like this:
Linearize
Click on the linearize bookmarklet - note that the empty space on the left and right disappear so that the site spreads across the width of the browser. Also, the generic Blogspot toolbar on the top is removed.
Zap Images
Now I’m going to zap images. This example only has one - it’s more impressive on an image-heavy site. The cool thing is that it does not leave an empty gap where the picture used to be and moves text to fill in the spot.
Zap Colors
And finally, here is what the site looks like when you use the zap color bookmarklet.
Now with the color and images stripped from the site, it no longer looks like I’m goofing off, right? The site is now less entertaining and more factual to the passerby’s quick glance.
Ok ok, I’m seriously joking about doing this at work. Let’s say you were visiting someone’s Myspace page and they have obnoxiously difficult-to-read text on a pictured background….now it’s more useful right?
But wait…what if you don’t mind experiencing the page with all its designful glory? Simply refresh the page, and the good old version of the site is back. For this very same reason, you would have to zap annoyances away on each page you visit, but since it involves simple clicking, it’s not a tedious chore.
So check out the site for other annoyances you can zap, such as Flash, movie clips, etc.
One Comment
Lots of cool stuff you can do with bookmarklets. Zapping stuff like that is just one thing.
And, if you end up doing one of these all the time, you can get a Firefox extension called Greasemonkey. Given the right script, it can then automatically zap things on ANY page within a domain (or any page in a subdirectory, or using even more specific methods).