Occasionally Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), our default browser at work, just will not display a page because of some mysterious “Error on Page”. When you go to a service like Web2PDF [^] which converts web pages to PDF the page will still display. Which is a little bit annoying.
Web2PDF even let you email a web address to them and they email you the PDF. This means copying the address that Internet Explorer choked on into the Subject line, and entering the email address – simple! But it could be even easier, it is a pain in the backside if you need to do a few of these.
This set me thinking; I have a Google Reader Subscribe button (bookmarklet) and a Delicious type bookmarklet, both of which “paste” a web address into a new page – so why can’t I have an Email version?
Well it turns out these buttons are just snippets of javascript code. And, they are easily altered to do just what I wanted. Fairly quickly I got to:
javascript:location.href='mailto:submit@web2pdfconvert.com?Subject='+encodeURIComponent('%3C'+location.href+'%3E')
The last piece of the puzzle was wrapping the address in “< >” brackets (the %3C and %3E) so that complex addresses get treated properly.
Now with this as a new shortcut in by IE Favorites Bar all I have to do is hit the button, and press send in my email client – Too Easy!
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