A Simple Trick to Highlight the External Links on a Web Page

Some popular websites – including Mashable, The Huffington Post and TechCrunch – include too many internal links in their stories (hyperlinks pointing back to their own website) and it often becomes difficult to determine the links that are pointing to external websites.

You have to hover your mouse over a link and look at the status bar of your browser to know where that link is pointing to. That’s lot of work.

Highlight External Links using Favicon Images

Before: This is the original page on TechCrunch

After: The same page but the external hyperlinks are now highlighted

If you wish to quickly highlight all the external hyperlinks on a page, just drag the following bookmarklet link to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar.

Highlight Links

Now when you are on a web page that looks cluttered with links, just click this bookmarklet button and it will add favicons next to all external hyperlinks on that page while the styling of internal links is left untouched.

The bookmarklet will also add underlines to external links  making it easier for you to distinguish between external and internal links. And in case you wish to revert to the original style of hyerlinks, just hit the refresh button (Ctrl + R) in your browser.

I have uploaded the bookmarklet source code (de-obfuscated) on ctrlq.org in case you wish to modify the link styling. The favicons for corresponding websites are automatically generated using this simple Google hack.

Find the Exact Date When a Google Maps Image was Taken

Curious to know the exact date when Google cameras captured those aerial and street view photographs of your home (or any other address)? Well you can find that data easily in Google Maps and Google Earth.

Finding the capture date of Satellite Images

If you wish to know the date when satellites captured those aerial images that you now see in Google Maps, you will have to use Google Earth for that (for some reason, these dates aren’t displayed on the Google Maps website).

Launch the Google Earth program, search for any location and zoom in as much as possible. You should see the capture date of that image in the status bar as highlighted in the above screenshot.

Finding the capture date of Street View Images

If you happen to live in a country where Google Street View is available, you can use the Google Maps website itself to determine the date when Google Street Views cars were in your area shooting pictures of the neighborhood.

Search for an address in Google Maps and switch to the street view by dragging that street view icon to the map. The image date will be displayed in the status bar again though in this case, Google only reveals the month and year of the picture but not the exact date.

To summarize, you need to use Google Earth to determine the capture date of Aerial Images and Google Maps for finding the date of Street View images.