Yahoo! SMS Bookmarklet

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I've been using this bookmarklet I whipped up for the US Yahoo PC to SMS service found here. It lets me send 120 characters of any text I've selected on a web page to a phone. Perfect for little bits of info or URLs that I want to have handy. Yes, I know there are other toolbar things or services that'll send longer messages broken up, but I wanted to do the same with Yahoo! and a basic bookmarklet (I'm not a big fan of toolbars).

I've only tested it in FireFox - it works pretty well. Just drag/drop this link to your toolbar.

Send Selected Text to Phone

The default Javascript calls up two prompts, one for the phone number, and one to confirm the message text. If you've selected some text on the page, it automagically pastes it into the second prompt and truncates it to 120 characters so you can see what will actually be sent. If you want to tweak the Javascript a bit, you can edit the first variable called "phone" which will default the number so you don't have to type it in all the time. If you want to speed up the process, you can change the conf var to false, and it'll just take the first 120 characters of whatever you've selected, and send it off to your phone, no questions asked.

A few caveats: you need to be a logged in Y! user, and you'll have to hit the back button afterwards to get back to the original page, so hopefully you don't lose anything in the process. But it works pretty well. If you're a Javascript wizard and can improve the script, please send it on over. Like I've said, I've been using this to snag URLs and other snippets of text (like flight numbers, phone numbers, etc.) and just zip it to my phone.

Enjoy!

-Russ

Update: My colleague Mor sent me an email saying that it'd be great to get the actual URL from the selected html text, which I agree (that's one of my examples above). But after messing with it for a bit, I couldn't figure out how to select the URL using the Javascript samples out there, and I don't really get it enough to write it from scratch. But then it dawned on me that really what you want to do most of the time is send the page you're currently looking at - which is really easy to do (thanks to examples from del.icio.us and others!). Of course the URL has to be less than 120 characters... which is another problem, but I'm not messing with TinyURL right now (if anyone wants, they can send me that version, and I'll post it). But I did include two variations of the new bookmarklet, one which passes the raw link to your phone and another that passes the link through Phonifier.com to make it more likely you can see it. :-)

Here they are:

Send Page Link to Phone

Send Page Link thru Phonifier

-R

Update 2: It dawned on me that you could make this into a FireFox Custom Keyword as well, and send right from the address bar! You can't use Javascript, so you have to embed your phone number into the link, but it works pretty well. Right click on this link: SendMe and choose "Bookmark This Link", edit the phone number in the n params (it's split up for some reason), and then add a keyword like "sendme" or even "txt" or something and save. Next time you want to send yourself something quick, just click on the addressbar, type your keyword and your message (like "txt this is a phone number or url"), and it'll fire off a message. :-)

-R

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