plainoldrecipe VS bookmarklets

I built a website that takes online recipe pages and just returns the main recipe in plain text. https://www.plainoldrecipe.com

Bookmarklets are great in mobile browsers. This is handy if you want to avoid writing an extension for a simple script.

I use a bookmarklet I wrote all the time to remove the extra content from online recipes: https://github.com/kevlened/foodmarklet

It’s based on https://github.com/poundifdef/plainoldrecipe, but it works entirely in the client.

Ahh Bookmarklets.. my first love.. Long time ago in about era of 2004-2010 I only knew about html & php. In about 2011 I found the javascript. Next year I found the bookmarklets.

My first Bookmarklet: When is my next payday? My job used to pay salary monthly, on second last working day of month (Sun to Thu was working week). I eagerly used to count the days remaining for next payday. I realized that Javascript can do this for me. PayDay was born. I still have the code at https://gitlab.com/davchana/payday/-/blob/beta/payday_v1_01_... Coincidently this was my first project on Gitlab.

Then, Google Chrome used to remember passwords, but there was no password manager inbuilt to view passwords. I found this View Passwords code at https://ostermiller.org/bookmarklets/viewpass.js & minified it & have been using it since last 12 years, in a mobile with ViewPasswords name. The only change I did was making the div containing found passwords contenteditable to make it easy to copy. I have been using it since 2012. Somewhere in between these years I lost the original code but I came across it again in 2023.

I also made my own version of fancy view passwords, code at https://gitlab.com/davch/bookmarklets/-/blob/master/viewPass... but I tend to use the original one more often.

One of the proudest bookmarklet is CAJobAppsGSV2 (California Job Apps Google Apps Script v2). CA has a standard way of applying for government jobs, where you create templates per position title & then apply it by going through 5 or 6 pages. This BM looks at the address, a switch fires up the function, that function choses the correct dropdown values & clicks appropriate buttons & also saves some data in SessionStorage. After the confirmation it adds a div to the box, which on clicked upon closes itself. The BM prepares data from storage & page, & fires up a POST request to Google Apps Web Script, which saves it as a line item to a sheet. While doing this, it logs the statuses to the div.