8th
A bookmarklet for generating QR codes
Many new mobile devices, such as a T-Mobile G1 running Android, have barcode scanners that can extract URLs automatically from QR codes. Already popular in Japan, QR codes provide a mechanism for encoding arbitary data in an error-tolerant image format, offering a flexible way of distributing information like URLs in a machine readible form that can be emailed, printed out, or displayed on a screen. While OCR techniques are steadily improving, QR codes are significantly easier for a machine to read than strings of characters, and sometimes work better than publishing a URL directly.
The Google Chart API has support for generating QR codes, and we can use that feature to create a browser bookmarklet that makes it trivial to generate a QR code for any site on the fly.
Simply drag this bookmarklet to your browser toolbar:
Now visit any site you like and click on the ‘QR Code’ bookmarklet. A new window or browser tab will open, and in it you will find your QR code. You can download this image and email it around or print it, or you can save the URL and use it directly in a <img /> element and embed the code on your own pages. Anyone with a QR code scanner on their mobile device can easily navigate to the site just by holding their phone up to the code and scanning it in.
For example, here’s the QR code for http://blog.unto.net/:
This QR code was generated via the URL:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=300x300&chl=http%3A//blog.unto.net/
Enjoy!