GrabLinks

GrabLinks lets you hover over any section of a web page and grab all of the links contained in that portion of the page, handing them back to you as a nicely-formatted Markdown list. It’s a great way to get bunches of links into nvALT or any plain text situation.

If the link has a title attribute, it becomes the title of the Markdown link. If not, it uses the text of the link (with whitespace stripped). It avoids duplicates and resolves relative urls to the current host, so you don’t get broken links to the blog you were reading. It even avoids Twitter and Facebook share links.

The resulting Markdown is automatically highlighted for copying. You can open them all in tabs with the SystemUIServer Service “Open URL,” which should show up when you right click on the selection. You can also use some of my tricks for opening batch urls with Dropzone, PopClip, or maybe bitly. Or, you can just stick them away in text files, Evernote, Together or any notes app with their full titles for easy searching later.

Here’s the bookmarklet. Just drag it into your bookmarks bar and click it on a page with some interesting links. As you move the cursor over the page, the areas under it will highlight. The innermost highlighted area is what links will be grabbed from when you click. You can often target smaller areas by moving the cursor into the pixels-wide margin/padding areas around the group of links you want.

GrabLinks is auto-updating. It actually loads the script from the source and will therefore always load the latest stable version. It pops up a small “Loading” indicator until the script loads and — if needed — injects jQuery. If it’s a fast load, you may just see a brief flash of white in the upper left corner. Do not be panic. Stay in your homes.