I have been kvetching about the quality of embeddable tooling out there, so I'm working on discovering anything interesting. I started with bookmarklets, which I think is one of the most underutilized, and simplest examples of working with APIs on the web. Here are a couple of interesting bookmarklets for APIs out there:
- Twitter - Probably the most iconic API and bookmarklet out there -- share to Twitter.
- Pinboard - An API-driven bookmarklet for saving bookmarks that I use every day.
- Hypothesis - A whole suite of API-driven bookmarklets for annotating the web.
- Socrata - A pretty cool bookmarklet for quickly viewing documentation on datasets.
- Tin Can API - A bookmarklet for recording self-directed learning experiences.
When you search for API bookmarklets you don't get much. Nothing stands out as being innovative. I will keep looking when I have time, and I'll keep curating and understanding any new approaches, and examples, and tooling when possible.
Ultimately it just confounds me, because a simple JS bookmarklet triggering one or more API interactions is a no brainer. We have examples of this in action, making an impact on login, sharing, annotation, and more, so why don't we have more examples? IDK. It is something I'll explore as I push forward my embeddable API research.
Maybe I'm just missing something...
