IE8 Accelerator for MSDN Social Bookmarks

I’ve been using IE8 Beta 2 for a few weeks now and I’m getting quite used to do actions on text or links by using Accelerators. If you haven’t seen these, accelerators allow you to easily call a service on a link or a piece of selected text. For example, a standard Accelerator is “Map with Live Maps” which shows a map when selecting an address on a page.

One service I use quite regularly is social bookmarking, lately I’ve been using the new MSDN Social Bookmarks one for work related bookmarks. Having IE8 I wanted to replace the bookmarklet from the Favorites toolbar by an accelerator.

BTW, the folks at MSDN just did a nice redesign with all the social info gathered including your community contributions, forums threads etc. Nice job: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com

Now back to the accelerator. For the description that goes with the bookmark I simply select an interesting sentence on a page and use the accelerator (if text is selected).

Creating an Accelerator is very straightforward and easy, you just need to follow the OpenService specification, which is really just an XML file following a predefined schema. For the MSDN Bookmarks I enabled this on text selection, and on a right-click on a page:

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Click to install the “Bookmark on MSDN Accelerator if you are using the IE8 Beta 2.
And if you want to take a look at the few lines of XML needed to build it just download it directly from here.

And if you’re looking for more Accelerators to share your bookmarks check out the gallery.

Resources for creating your own Accelerator: