Trouble with ectoize bookmarklet and Firefox?

I had been using ecto and the ectoize bookmarklet for a long time to log useful info off the web.

What ectoize does is it copies any text you have selected on a webpage and copies it into a new entry along with the page title enclosed in an hyperlink to the original page. At that point, you can either just log the quotation or if you want to post about it, you can quickly write around the core of the entry. It automates creating a weblog entry and then handcopying the URL and the text and pasting them into the new entry.

One day I managed to disable ectoize in Firefox by pressing enter while the ‘Remember this choice for all future instances’ box was ticked.

I was unable to reenable the ectoize bookmarklet – once fully disabled, clicking on the bookmarklet does nothing. Nowhere in the Firefox preferences can you fix this. It’s not listed under Application Helpers.

I have it working again now, but the solution is very hard to find. It’s buried in a forum entry over in the Kula support forum which doesn’t appear to be indexed by Google. So here is the solution where everybody can find it.

I had this same problem. The way to fix it is: in Firefox, open a new window (or tab) and type ‘about:config’ into the address bar. Scroll through the list until you find: ‘network.protocol-handler.external.ecto’ in the left-most column. double-click on that row and it should change the ‘false’ value to ‘true’. Now when you try the bookmarklet again, make sure you have nothing selected to quote or only a few words, then you should get the message which will then let you see the ‘Launch Application’ button and your bookmarklet should be fixed!

Thanks bcmac – this was your one forum post and a good one.

I would add that not only should you click ectoize with very little text selected, you should make sure that the page you are on is:

1. a very short URL
2. empty

For the record, if you have ecto but don’t have ectoize, the way to install the ectoize bookmarklet is by selecting the Install Bookmark item in the ecto menu.

How to Install the ectoize bookmarklet

If you’re in a hurry, here is the ecto bookmarklet for ecto 2.4.1. The bookmarklet doesn’t seem to change much between versions so go ahead and install from here.

To install the ecto bookmarklet, drag the following link to your browser’s menu or favorites toolbar:

If somebody would like to rewrite the javascript above for the ectoize bookmarklet to put the selected text in blockquotes instead of break tags, that would be great. It would save me a little bit of trouble every time I use it.

I would be happy to post the new javascript here or link to it.

If anybody could write a version which would grab source for the highlighted material instead of plain text that would also be very useful on occasion. I don’t think that’s possible though within the current browser framework – the browser itself has no way of knowing or showing what source code is selected within the display mode.