If you have one of my scripts you want to try out, or one of your own, but your cranky site administrator refuses to give you edit rights, never fear! JQuery + Firefox is here!

This evening, Iain Munro needed me to test my Calendar Preview Pane script on one of the Fabulous 40 templates. Problem: his site is private and I don’t want to install the entire template just to test this for him (no offense).

Solution: With Firefox, Firebug, and the jQuerify bookmartlet, I was able to test this for him and provide assurance it can work.

Setup:

1. Get FireFox. Seriously, with the IE-tab add on, there’s no reason to suffer any more.
2. Install Firebug
3. Drag this jQuery bookmarklet to your Bookmarks Toolbar (this version updated for jQuery 1.3) »jQuerify«
4. Open your test page.

I navigated to WSSDemo, a great site with live demos of OOB SharePoint sites. I located the template and clicked the link to view the live site.

Test:

1. Copy the script to test to the clipboard.
2. Open Firebug console and enable the console panel.
3. After the page reloads, use the Bookmark to “jQuerify” the page.
4. (Optional) Sometimes, like with this test, you need to add some HTML to the page as well. Click on the HTML tab above the left side of Firebug’s console. Select an area of the page where you want to place your new code and click the edit button in the top of Firebug’s menu.
5. Paste the script to run in right side of Firebug’s console panel. If your script has a document.ready event to start things, take that out since we aren’t going to reload the page. That means for our test script, we turn…
6. This…

   $(function() {
   	window.onerror = handleError; //needed for IE
   	initjLoadMe();
   });

7. Into this…

   window.onerror = handleError; //needed for IE
   	initjLoadMe();

8. Click run.

I suppose if you had a helpful script that only you needed, you could make your own jQuery bookmarklet that also calls your script. Who needs web parts?

It’s also fun to click the bookmarklet on your favorite sites, you might be surprised how many of them use jQuery.

Paul Grenier