{"id":255,"date":"2007-02-01T20:31:20","date_gmt":"2007-02-02T04:31:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wapreview.com\/?p=255"},"modified":"2020-09-26T16:23:13","modified_gmt":"2020-09-26T23:23:13","slug":"bookmarklets-for-opera-mini","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/255\/","title":{"rendered":"Bookmarklets for Opera Mini"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve discovered something very useful which I think will help mobile social tagging to really take off – Opera Mini Bookmarklets.<\/p>\n

I’m addicted to bookmarklets, which I use all the time in my web browser. If you haven’t tried them yet, give bookmarklets a whirl. They give you browser toolbar buttons that do all sorts of neat things with the web page you are currently viewing. Like searching Technorati, Bloglines or Google Blogsearch for blog items that refer to the current page. Or counting the number of characters in highlighted text on the page or viewing the page’s headers. There’s one particular bookmarklet that I use constantly. It adds the current page to my del.icio.us links. I store everything in del.icio.us. It’s a huge convenience to be able to add to and access my bookmarks from any machine.<\/p>\n

I’ve wanted to use bookmarklets in my mobile browser and it turns out that I can with Opera Mini! Bookmarklets require JavaScript which most mobile browsers don’t support. But Opera Mini supports a subset of JavaScript sufficient to run many bookmarklets including the Post to Del.icio.us one that I use all the time. Actually I want to start using Mobitopia (review<\/a>) for my mobile bookmarks but I haven’t been able to find a bookmarklet that works reliably on that site.<\/p>\n

There’s no browser toolbar in Opera Mini so you store bookmarklets on the regular bookmarks page. With the Advanced MIDP2 version of Opera Mini you can assign a bookmark to a hot-key so that keying *, 1 adds the current page to del.icio.us, for example.<\/p>\n

I think that all versions of Opera Mini support bookmarkets, I used them successfully in 3.1 (both low memory and high memory versions) and 4.0. The tricky part is getting bookmarklets into Opera Mini. There’s no drag and drop or any way to save a link as a bookmark. You need to add bookmarklets manually to the bookmarks page. That’s easy if your phone supports copy and paste. Just copy the bookmark’s code into an email and send it to your carrier’s email to SMS gateway. Bluetooth is another possibility if your phone has the ability to copy and paste from a text file sent by bluetooth. Unfortunately, most phones don’t do copy and paste. I tried and failed to come up with some JavaScript to put in a mobile web page that when clicked would magically add the bookmarklet to Opera Mini like you can in web browsers. You really don’t<\/strong> want to key in the bookmarklet URL – a tedious and error prone process. Fortunately, I’ve found a relatively easy way to send bookmarklets to any phone which I’ll explain below:<\/p>\n

To add bookmarklets to Opera Mini I’ve set up a web page that has links to itself with the bookmarklet’s JavaScript appended to end of the link url. The JavaScript needs to be separated from the real url by a slash and a question mark to make it a valid web address. When you visit the link with Opera Mini you can bookmark the page and then edit the bookmark to remove the http url, slash and question mark from the beginning leaving just the JavaScript. If that isn’t clear, keep reading and I’ll go over the process in detail below.<\/p>\n

First some Gotchas;<\/p>\n