Favelets for Yahoo Store and general Web Development
I have a confession to make. I'm an efficiency groupie. If it will make my job at the computer faster and easier, I'm all about it. Remembering to use it...well, that seems to come with time. Today's quick post is about the links bar, and using favelets. Favelets (also known as bookmarklets) are a topic unto themselves that I will cover in depth soon. For now I'm going to focus on favelets I use specifically for Yahoo Store. If you're not a Yahoo Store developer or owner, you probably won't care about this post.
Basically, a bookmarklet or favelet is a link that you have saved as if it were a URL, but is actually a JavaScript script that will run some action or actions for you.
First, to create a favelet, you create a bookmark in the same way you normally would. In most web browsers you can drag the URL icon to where you want it, or in Internet Explorer press CTRL+D if all else fails. Once you have the bookmark created, you can right-click it, go to Properties, and modify the URL. A common URL of a favelet would look like this:
javascript:alert('my first favelet');
Sometime it will tell you "Javascript is not a registered protocol" when you try to save them. Just ignore/say yes to any prompts, assuming you know where the bookmarklet came from and you trust their JavaScript. Please note, make sure each favelet copies completely on one line. You might want to paste into notepad first to make sure it is all there without any linebreaks before pasting it into your shortcut's properties box.
To save the following favelets, just right-click them and choose "Add to Favorites" (IE) or "Bookmark this Link" (Firefox). Or, you can drag them directly to your Links bar.
Yahoo Store Manager - This one will link directly to a Yahoo Store Manager. This is the page where you can choose Store Editor, View Orders, Reports, etc. In order to do this, you use the following favelet:
Yahoo Store Editor - It will prompt you for a store ID, such as yhst-12345678901234, and will take you directly to the Manager. Similarly, you can create a link to the Store Editor with this favelet:
View Page in Editor - This one will go directly to a page in the Yahoo Store editor. This is the same as hitting the yellow "Find" button and entering an ID, except it's less clicking and less waiting. This will only work if you are already logged into a store, the favelet will prompt you for the page ID.
TinyURL - This one is not really for just Yahoo Stores, but it's very helpful for sharing links over IM or email with clients or other developers. It will take a very long (think MapQuest) URL and shrink it to a very tiny URL.
META data popup - This one will extract all the META data from a page and show it in a popup. You might need to hold CTRL to break through popup blockers.
Resize Browser to... - This one resizes to any height and width you want, for example enter 800*600 to resize your browser to 800x600.
Many, many more favelets to come, but it's getting pretty close to "time to go to work", so that means it's "time to get some sleep"!
posted by steve at
4:47 AM
5 Comments:
You can't hide from me :)
Have you tried GreaseMonkey for super charging the editor? With it, I'm finally able to navigate the editor w/o a mouse. Happy days!
Anyhow, hit me up sometime on Yahoo or AIM.
By
Anonymous, at 3:08 PM
Since i don't spend a lot of time in store editor Tiny URL is the most interesting one for me :). Would be nice if after generating url it actually would go to that new url. But i guess there is no way of doing it without having access to tiny url site. Gotta have your own.
Thanks for nice tips.
By
Anonymous, at 9:56 AM
I agree, it should at least be an option you can set on Tinyurl's site with a cookie so it does it for your PC. Maybe they will add that :)
In IE (not sure about other browsers) it automatically copies it to your clipboard, so after you click the favelet and the new page loads, you can press F4 or Ctrl+O (focus address bar/open url), then Ctrl+V (paste) and [Enter] to go to that URL.
Still a little human interaction but down to as little as necessary!
By
steve, at 11:10 AM
I've used GreaseMonkey a little bit, but so far mostly scripts others have written. It's one of those things that, once I get started writing for it, it's going to tie up ALL my time because I can already see a million uses for it...so I've been putting it off because I'm swamped this month :-) But I'd love to hear about what you've done with it for the Editor, I think I emailed you (maybe?), I'll send another one tonight :) My Gtalk name is my email address, I'm always on there too.
By
steve, at 11:14 AM
Hi Stephan.
I don't even know how I found your blog but once I started reading I couldn't stop... very impressive.
I don't know if you can answer this but I need to give it a shot.
I built my Yahoo store with the Store Editor. I made one minor change to my front page (I added links at the bottom which do not even show up on the home page after being published) and now my Editor Toolbar doesn't show up on my front page at all! It's on all of my other store pages, just not the front page. Very annoying.
Any ideas or suggestions?
Thank you so much for your time, in advance!
Sincerely,
Shari
By
Anonymous, at 1:41 PM
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