I’m no programmer by any stretch of imagination; I mean, I do ActionScript every now and then, but nothing too fancy that will blow anyone’s minds. Still, that didn’t stop me from whipping up a dead-simple bookmarklet that allows me to submit Web links to Ping.fm:
Ping This!
(Drag the link onto your Bookmarks Toolbar for quick access.)
Update (10 Sept 2009): It seems Ping.fm caught wind of this, and decided it was worthy of adding to their Integration page. (It wasn’t there before.) Hooray for the Internet!
My inspiration came from similar attempts: one using the Pingout script (but didn’t pass any information about the page you’re currently on), and another one that required Gmail. I wanted something more convenient and straightforward, hence my own version based on the Ping This! script.
The bookmarklet passes the title and URL information of the currently-viewed Web page onto their corresponding text fields in the subsequent Ping This! form that it brings you to, that’s all. Everything else after that is standard Ping.fm functionality.
The only thing that bugs me is that it opens the Ping This! page in the same tab/window, though it’ll bring you back to the previous page you were viewing afterwards.
If you see anything that I might be able to improve on with regards to the bookmarklet above, let me know. Also, there’s probably a very good chance that this has already been done, and it would be nice not to dwell on that.
Wow! Thanks! This is great. I love Ping This, but hated having an extra toolbar to contend with. I can’t believe how easy you made this for me!!! YAY!
Well, dead-simple for you probably means massive “Huh’s?” and headaches for me. So, YAY to you again!
Glad you find it useful! I’m able to share good finds on the Web much easier now, and got a few friends to use it already. Google Reader uses something similar, but it gets recognized by Ping.fm as coming from the Conduit toolbar, which feels kinda hacky.
I was looking how to pass info to ping.fm, as i will be linking it to a icon didn’t want the ping this text… will be using php to fill in that info dynamically.
So thanks for that.