A Life Less Complex – A Bookmarklet for Complex.com readers

by rafi on April 3, 2011

April 10 2011 Update: The bookmarklet now works with Complex’s JSON galleries as well. Some of the Complex slideshows previously didn’t work, now all should. If you don’t see that functionality working your browser may have cached the old version of the script. In testing I saw this caching behavior in Google Chrome.

I decided to do some good for the world today. It’s been bugging me that Complex.com runs so many articles that require n clicks to get through where n ranges from 10 to infinity.

Like this week’s listicle showing the 50 Biggest NY Mets Fails, this is a fine topic but not one that could possibly warrant 50 clicks.

So today I created a bookmarklet which fetches all the slides of the Complex slideshow you’re visiting and loads them up on that one page.

To use it, just drag the link at the end of this article to your Bookmarks bar and when you’re at Complex looking at a slideshow article, click the button for it and the magic happens. AJAX calls are made to the slideshow’s pages and the appropriate chunks of content are added in one by one.

This is brand new so if you see any functionality issues just let me know. From limited testing, this bookmarklet works for the majority of the new slideshows there but not all – some are coded differently. If it’s worth pursuing, I may release future versions to be more thorough.

Bookmarklet (drag to your bookmarks bar): A Life Less Complex