For anyone stumbling upon this that deals with bookmarklets, I submit bookmarkl.ink[0], a tool I made to ease the maintenance of bookmarklets.
In short, it pulls code from GitHub Gists (which have the benefit of being backed by git repos), transpiles, minifies, bundles, and wraps in an IIFE. It's also got a basic module resolver that allows you to include libraries or remote files.
This allows you to use creature comforts like TS and libraries and maintain code readability while still ending up with the smallest possible bookmarklet. It also allows you to link to a particular version (git hash), present user-defined variables, edit code in an inline editor, etc.
Interestingly, in the URL CLI article, you mentioned the difficulty of maintaining such bookmarklets. That was a huge motivator for bookmarkl.ink. You can keep your verbose, commented code in a gist while the actual bookmarklet is tree shaken, stripped of comments, minified, and encoded. As of late, you even get some creature comforts like TypeScript support. Finally, every gist is a repo behind the scenes so you get version control for free.
Thanks! Re: listing bookmarklets, that's something I'd like to do but have yet to find a cheap/easy way to do it. One way would be to search gists for relevant metadata [1] but GitHub does not include searching gists in their API. Another way might be logging paths in an edge function. Open to suggestions/PRs.
> And (due to lack of trust) most applications make it hard to share javscripts links - so you need to instead instruct people to create a new bookmark and past [sic] the content into instead of right-clicking a link and clicking "bookmark".
This is mostly true for mobile browsers. For desktop, simply dragging the button to the bookmarks bar ought to do the trick. Please feel free to open an issue if you've found this not to be the case!
I believe I had this at one point but ditched it as browser support was spotty (looking at you, iOS Safari). Looks like support for async clipboard API [1] is getting there so I'll look at adding this functionality back.
Hi! Agreed re: advantages of gist/git backing. Comments and gist history via GitHub add a lot of value for free. The tool also allows bookmarklet creators to write in modern, un-obfuscated JS as there are transpilation, minification, and IIFE wrapping applied to the bookmarklet.
The security risk angle is also a concern I share. If you take a look at the disclaimer at the bottom of my project README [1], you'll see this exact issue mentioned. Versioning gists and thus bookmarklets is discussed in the same document [2]. This locks bookmarklet source to a specific commit of the git repo underlying a gist.
Unfortunately, no. This is a simple pet project aimed at easing sharing/versioning of bookmarklets. The site is entirely static. Listing bookmarklets is, however, something I'd love to add.
A simple and sensible way to list bookmarklets may be scraping GitHub's own search [1]. Using a flag in gists such as `// bookmarklink-index` or similar may be a good way to go.
I created a tool [1] to easily convert GitHub gists into bookmarklets and share them. Includes versioning, multi-file gists, etc. Some of my favourite examples hide images until mouseover [2] and play a procedural Brian Eno tune [3].
In short, it pulls code from GitHub Gists (which have the benefit of being backed by git repos), transpiles, minifies, bundles, and wraps in an IIFE. It's also got a basic module resolver that allows you to include libraries or remote files.
This allows you to use creature comforts like TS and libraries and maintain code readability while still ending up with the smallest possible bookmarklet. It also allows you to link to a particular version (git hash), present user-defined variables, edit code in an inline editor, etc.
Enjoy!
[0]: https://bookmarkl.ink