ReaderScroll: Google Reader Style Image Navigation With J-K Keys Bookmarklet

Posted September 15, 2008

Shortly after posting ScrollMonkey I realized the same functionality could be implemented as a bookmarklet, obviating the need for GreaseMonkey, making it available to a lot more people. So here it is implemented as a bookmarklet.

To refresh your memory, the script does a very simple thing - it brings the next image to the top of the browser window so you can see it. You hit “j” to see the following image and “k” to go back to the previous.

To install, click and drag the ReaderScroll bookmarklet to your FireFox toolbar or right click on it if you’re using IE.

Once installed in your toolbar, you can enable it for any website you’re visiting by clicking on it in your toolbar. For example, go to any of these pages with lots of images and then click the bookmarklet. Then click anywhere on the page you’re viewing and hit the “j” key several times until the first large image is at the top of the browser window. Now you can navigate to the next image by hitting “j” again and go back to previous images with “k”.

The bookmarklet doesn’t have the disadvantages associated with the ScrollMonkey GreaseMonkey version; it’s only triggered when you click it, so no unnecessary overhead. It would still make sense to make it more generic so you could navigate to the next paragraph, heading, etc. With jQuery under the hood this would be easy to do and I’ll do it if there’s demand for it.

And thanks to FriendFeed from whom I stole most of the idea for the bookmarklet.

7 Comments so far

  1. Life Clerks » Navigate Images with J-K Keys (Google Reader-Style) [Featured Bookmarklet] on September 23rd, 2008

    [...] a good example page of Olympics photos to try it out on. ReaderScroll: Google Reader Style Image Navigation With J-K Keys Bookmarklet [Standard [...]

  2. kftgr on September 23rd, 2008

    “google reader style”

    aka vi keys style?

  3. Navigate Images with J-K Keys (Google Reader-Style) [Featured Bookmarklet] | CHARGED's 24/7 News Aggregator on September 23rd, 2008

    [...] photos to try it out on. For more bookmarklet goodness, check out our top 10 useful bookmarklets. ReaderScroll: Google Reader Style Image Navigation With J-K Keys Bookmarklet [Standard [...]

  4. links for 2008-09-25 « copula’s weblog on September 25th, 2008

    [...] ReaderScroll: Google Reader Style Image Navigation With J-K Keys Bookmarklet - Standard Deviations (tags: bookmarklets images navigation) [...]

  5. yazan on September 27th, 2008

    serious compatibility bug … javascript in general doesnt work right when you have this script enabled. most notably facebook and google reader. well at least not for me.

    ironic that a script to apply my fav feature of greader elsewhere, yet f***s up greader totally

  6. Parand on September 28th, 2008

    Yazan, I’m not sure why you’d be enabling ReaderScroll in google reader or facebook. It’s intended to allow scrolling in pages with lots of images. Google Reader already has j-k navigation and facebook generally doesn’t have pages with lots of images.

    I’m happy to put time into fixing issues if they’re actual issues, but in this case the solution is simply not to click the bookmarklet when you go to google reader or facebook (or any other page that’s not a long list of images).

  7. 6 must see sites with unique keyboard navigation on March 1st, 2009

    [...] don’t implement custom javascript navigation via the keyboard can be improved by using a Greasemonkey or bookmarklet script, and the web community seems to be hungry for it, particularly for phototype sites like Flickr. On [...]

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