In this month’s Mac 911 column, I offer a bookmarklet (a small bit of Javascript that you can save as a bookmark and reuse) that easily creates an email message that contains the name and URL of Safari’s currently active webpage. Reader John G. Bell has done me one better by concocting a bookmarklet that does a bit more. I’ll let him explain:
This updated bookmarklet will create a mail message with the document title in the subject and include selected text from the document in the body of the message followed by the url for the document surrounded by the angle braces, which is a suggested way to set off urls in text documents so that punctuation doesn’t interfere.
The code for that bookmarklet is contained within this link.
To make it work, you can click on the link above and drag it into Safari’s Bookmark Bar. Alternatively, Control-click on the link above and choose Copy Link to Clipboard from the contextual menu. Highlight the text in Safari’s Address field and paste. Now drag the globe icon that precedes the URL into the Bookmarks Bar. Using either method, give the link an intuitive name such as John’s MailTo and you’re good to go. When you click this item, your default email client will open and create a new message that contains the elements Mr. Bell describes.
Note that if Safari and Mail are your web browser and email client of choice, you can obtain similar results (minus the selected text pasted in the body of the message) by selecting the URL in Safari’s Address field and choosing Services > Mail > Send Selection from the Safari menu.