Automatically grab the title of a web page

Published on 11 May 2025

I often need to grab the title of a web page. For instance, this comes in handy when I am creating a new Wikipedia Page, like this one for Raoulia grandiflora, where I needed to grab the title of web pages for the references.

To do this, I used to manually write out the titles, or guess at them. Then, I figured out that I could load up the sourcepage for the page using Firefox, and find the <title> tag. It wasn’t long after that that I realized I could use the Firefox Developer Console to type document.title, and then copy that to my clipboard and use it.

Today, I realized I could automate that, too. So, I made this Alfred Workflow. It uses osascript to copy the title:

tell application "Firefox"
    set winTitle to name of front window
end tell
set the clipboard to winTitle
return winTitle

This is great, because I can now type ‘copytitle’ in Alfred, and then have the title right on my clipboard.

To make it easier to put these titles into BibTex, I also made this TextExpander template:

@misc{,
  author={},
  title={},
  howpublished={},
  url={},
  note={Accessed: <insert date>
},
  urldate={Accessed: <insert date>
}
}

The date is automatically inserted.

This saves me a good amount of time. Great.