This is an excellent development - The Big Picture from boston.com, a beautiful photo blog and one of the big reasons for putting ReaderScroll together, has implemented j/k navigation, inspired by ReaderScroll. Nicely done - now you can navigate the pictures via the j/k keys.

One down, many more to go. First step towards j/k navigation everywhere.

Btw, several people have pointed out vi used j/k navigation before Google Reader. True enough. j/k was also used in very old keyboard based games. However, the use of j/k to center web content was first brought to my attention in Google Reader, so I’m sticking with “Google Reader Style” instead of “vi style”.

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.