Currently my browser toolbar is full! I have so many bookmarklets that in order to use my toolbar bookmarks I have to scroll to the left to see most of them. Why is this? I have four weblogs and subscribe to at least ten social software and bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, flickr, and blinklist. While I love the idea of bookmarklets and they save me lots of time I currently have bookmarklet overload. Finally, someone has come up with an intelligent and easy to use solution using AJAX.
Blummy is a new mini app from Alexander Kirk of Bandnews and in my opinion this is the best free apps of its kind. As Alex says, “blummy is a tool for quick access to your favorite web services via your bookmark toolbar.It consists of small widgets, called blummlets, which make use of Javascript to provide rich functionality (such as bookmarklets).”
Blummy comes pre-configured with several popular bookmarklets such as del.icio.us, google page rank, blogmarks, whois, and a few others. What makes blummy so cool is that you can also create your own blummlets (or bookmarklets). Because of this you can use blummy on almost every page on the web, and to manage all of your bookmarklets – I’m calling them blummlets from now on! Blummy even checks the syntax of your javascript for all of your blummlets as you add them.
From a user experience perspective blummy is intuitive and easy to use. I had no problem with the simple one step registration, configuration, and implementation. Alex uses AJAX in an intelligent and helpful way. Pre-configured blummlets can be dragged into your personal blummy, and its overall size in your browser is controlled by just dragging the bottom corner.There’s many more AJAX goodies if you look around.
As far as issues go I could only find two. The first was a possible performance issue. A couple of times I’ve gone to use blummy I’ve had the page stall for a few seconds trying to connect to blummy.com. I’ve only tried it on my office connection so it could be me although our connection is very robust. The second issue I found was that in FireFox on OSX I’ve found that if I open blummy and don’t bookmark anything the close button does not always work. I’ve tested it on 6 browsers and two platforms and it works as expected in all of them except for these two issues. Blummy is young, so the above mentioned issues seem rather minor.
At this point I only have a couple of suggestions for further development. It looks as if Alex has already considered this one, but I would be nice to have some of the other more popular bookmarklets pre-installed like blinklist, bloglines, digg and simpy. In his current blummy admin he already has pagination, most popular etc so it looks like this one is on the way. Another suggestion would be some kind of drag and drop bookmarklet library so non experienced users could build there own more easily. My final suggestion would be the ability to use this on your own server, even if there was a fee, I would be willing to use it on a few client projects.
I review countless numbers of ajax and rails widgets, functions and apps every week but Blummy is truly a new and useful app that everyone who adds content to multiple websites should try. Thanks to Alex and his co-developers for another fine project!
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