How To Make A Bookmarklet
Knowing how to program can save you from tedious repetitive tasks, such as inserting templates into a wiki page. Recently I’ve been spending more time editing the UK National Archives wiki Your Archives. I created a category for women’s wills, and while I was adding pages to it, I found that a lot of them didn’t have the correct template. Wills that were proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury are held by the National Archives and can be downloaded from their DocumentsOnline service. Transcripts of these wills can be posted on Your Archives, and we have a template for them which automatically creates a link back to DocumentsOnline based on an ID code, and formats some key data (testator’s name, dates, catalogue reference) in a standard form. Most of the data which goes into the template can be found in the DocumentsOnline index. We used to copy and paste each value manually, which was not the best use of a human’s time. Faced with the prospect of doing this an awful lot, I decided to write a program to do it automatically. First I threw together a Python script, which was alright for me but no use for people who don’t have Python and BeautifulSoup (and I also wrote it in such a way that it relied on Linux with xclip installed). So then I decided to rewrite it in JavaScript, so that other people could use it in their browsers. You can find the finished version and documentation on the PCC Will Bookmarklet page. Below is a walk through of how I did it.
