LinLog

Author's note: I started the draft of this article way back on July 1, 2013. Sadly, it's still pretty relevant.

So I'm built myself a nice little web-based bookmarking app. I wanted something that would both give me some insight into how I use my bookmarks and also save me from worrying about syncing bookmarks between multiple browsers on multiple devices. And since I've regained my distrust of "the Cloud" with the demise of Google Reader, I decided to write my own. (Note from the future: Yes, I know seven years ago, but I still don't really trust cloud services.) If you're interested, check out the GitHub page. Maybe one day I'll make a real, official release of it. I call in Lnto, with "ln" being the UNIX "link" command and a tie-in to "LnBlog", the software that runs this site. (For LnBlog, the tie-in was to "ln" for the natural logarithm, i.e. "natural bLOG". Get it? I swear I thought it was funny at the time.)

One must-have feature for such an app is a "bookmark this page" feature. With native browser bookmarks, this is built in. With a web app...not so much. So the solution is to either write an extension for every browser I want to support (which is a lot of work), or just write a bookmarklet - a little piece of JavaScript that you can bookmark and run with a single click. Since this is a personal project that I'm doing in my limited free time, the latter seemed like the obvious choice.

There's just one problem here - mobile browsers. In addition to my laptop and my desktop, I have an Android phone and a Kindle Fire that I want to support. And while the actual bookmarklet code works just fine on all of those devices, actually bookmarking it isn't quite so easy. Because they're mobile browsers, you can't just drag the link to the toolbar as you would on the desktop.

Until recently, Firefox Mobile handled this well. (Author's note: We're back to the current time now, not 2013.) It would allow you to bookmark a bookmarklet like a normal bookmark. You just had to press the link and select a "bookmark this link" item from the menu. Then you could just bring up the bookmark screen when you were on a page and it would run the bookmarklet. However, with the updates for Firefox Mobile 81, that doesn't work anymore - the javascript: URL scheme doesn't seem to get executed when you invoke the bookmark. And other browsers don't seem to support bookmarking the bookmarklet in the first place. This link suggests that it's possible using bookmark syncing, but I'm not sure if that still works and I don't really want to turn on syncing anyway.

What I eventually did was just create a page that I can paste a URL into and it will do the same thing as the bookmarklet. It's not great, but it's serviceable. At some point, maybe I'll get around to creating an Android app. Then I'll have some native integration options to work with.