Filtering Reddit and Hacker News

Giles had a fantastic rant this week that cut to the heart of what’s wrong with all of these “social web application sites”:

People who waste their own time have, in effect, more votes than people who value it - to elevate bad but popular ideas and irretrievably sink independent thinking.

It’s analogous to what’s wrong with the entire massively online roleplaying game genre (eg: World of Warcraft) in that success is a greater factor of the time invested than of skill or talent. Many social web applications add extra features to keep the users interacting with the site, even if this interaction offers dubious value to their lives.

Become a Greasemonkey Ninja with jQuery

This is for all the Greasemonkeyers in the house who want to learn how to be much more productive when it comes to hacking together Greasemonkey script by using my favorite Javascript library: jQuery. jQuery will turn a 700 line Greasemonkey script into a 12 line Greasemonkey script. I learned about jQuery through all of the Greasemonkey scripts I created to work with Friend Feed.

This is advanced stuff that is of interest to people writing Javascript. If you’re just a Greasemonkey user then you can safely skip this one.

How to Unminify Javascript Code

As websites have moved away from static pages to interactive updating displays, the modern Greasemonkey hacker has been forced to learn new tricks: namely interacting with the Javascript on a website. Sometimes that’s harder than it looks because the Javascript on the site you want to modify has been minified.

Friend Feed Scripts: Unsubscribe, Who Are You and Better By Service

It’s another week which means I have more Friend Feed scripts to share with you all.

Greasemonkey Scripts: Friend Feed Auto-Pagerization, Resharing Links and Even More

It’s the last day of my week of Friend Feed and I have 5 more Greasemonkey scripts for you (for a total of 8). I think I’m done writing scripts for Friend Feed for the next little while.

Greasemonkey Scripts: Friend Feed Twitter Client and Remove Visited Links

“Friend Feed” week seems to be continuing at IDT. But don’t worry, there’s a team of trained attack Bonobo monkeys prepared to take me into a dark alley and beat me up and make me suffer if I don’t stop talking about Friend Feed. What can I say? This is what it looks like when a web app gets people excited. I’ve put together two more Greasemonkey scripts to add features I want to Friend Feed.

Greasemonkey Script: Filter FriendFeed by Service

I’ve sipped the Kool Aid and I’m really liking Friend Feed as a lifestreaming aggregator. One feature that is a bit hard to find is filtering by individual services. I’ve created a Greasemonkey script that sticks a huge bar of icons at the top of the page to make this accessible.

Programming Best Practices: Profiling

In programming, profiling means to measure your code and find out which parts are using the most time and the most memory. Profiling gives you performance analysis measurements so that you can optimize your program for speed and/or memory.

How to Profile Greasemonkey Scripts with Firebug

Running performance analysis on Greasemonkey scripts can be a pain in the butt. They aren’t part of a webpage so standard tools for analyzing web sites don’t work… or do they?

Distraction Free GTD: 32 Todo List Web Applications

Web Runner is a tiny site-specific web application that runs using less resources than Firefox or Internet Explorer. The whole idea behind a site specific web browser is that you want to access a web application without being tempted to access other sites. You want to access a site without being distracted by the rest of the Internet. A good example is an online todo list or GTD application.

To make things easier for everyone I’ve created a huge bundle of Web Runner web applications centered around access ToDo/GTD web sites.

Managing Spam Maintenance with Akismet Auntie Spam Version 2

Akismet Auntie Spam is a maintenance script for WordPress administrators. One of the problems with the Akismet spam protection service is that sometimes it misidentifies a real comment as spam. WordPress has a spam recovery console that I like to call the spam inbox.

Revolutionizing the Web with Firefox and Greasemonkey (with screenshots)

A greasemonkey is a mechanic who works on your automobile. He gets his hands dirty, and goes under the hood to find out why your car is making that clunking noise. Greasemonkey is an extension for Firefox that does much the same thing, but without the ridiculous fees.

How to Install a Firefox Extension (with screenshots)

One of my favorite features of Firefox is that users can modify it with extensions. No matter what it is you want to do or change about a web page, there is undoubtedly an extension out there already that does it for you. Someone has gone to through all the hard work and now all you have to do is install it to reap the benefits.

This guide is intended for beginners.

Greasemonkey Script: Yahoo Pipe Cleaner

Yahoo Pipes can create automated lists that you can cut-and-paste into blog posts. My only real complaint is with the HTML markup they create. It doesn’t look good when you cut-and-paste it into a WordPress blog. This is where Yahoo Pipe Cleaner comes in. It is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that fixes the Yahoo Pipe output so that it looks nicer when you cut-and-paste it into a WordPress blog.

• removes any H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 headers
• dofollows the links (removes rel=nofollow)
• replaces paragraphs with list elements
• removes all class/id CSS selectors

How Do People Use Google Reader with Internet Explorer?

Any computer geek worth his salt has been through the drill: you go to visit a family member for dinner and eventually they mention some arcane problem they’ve been having with software you long ago expunged from all of your computers. Common culprits are the Unholy Triad: Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer and Norton Anti-Virus. But what’s much worse than when solving some niggling problem that is only caused by their choice apps is when you volunteer to enter the belly of the beast and perform some “improvements” of your own free will.

To all the computer geeks reading this I offer you a humble warning: nothing good can come from volunteering to “improve” a family member’s computer. Don’t fix what ain’t broke.

My Top Must Have Firefox Extensions

I’m always amazed that people use Internet Explorer over Firefox. With the available extensions Firefox becomes the nerve center of your Internet activity. Lifehacker quite often has good suggestions for FF Extensions to try out.

These are what I use. All links go to more information about the extension.

Greasemonkey Script: Find images that are too wide and break your blog template

Ever try to stick a 550 pixel-wide image into a 500 pixel-wide space? Firefox will increase the space, but under Internet Explorer 6 (or lower) it will move the sidebar so that it comes AFTER the blog posts.
Figure 1: Crappy MSPaint drawing explaining what I’m talking about.

Blog themes come in two flavours. Fluid/liquid where the [...]

Too much Spam - Akismet Auntie Spam for WordPress.com (Greasemonkey Script)

I don’t know about you but my Akismet spam folder on my WordPress.com is filled to the brim (56 pages deep, which is ridiculous if you consider that anything older than 15 days is automatically deleted). It’s considered good form to take a peek to make sure that no one’s comments are being accidently deleted, [...]

Greasemonkey script: increase size of del.icio.us save bookmark extension

This is a modified version of “del.icio.us maxim.us” that extends the text entry boxes (title, url, notes, tags) to 800×600 when bookmarking pages with the del.icio.us extension.
You will need Firefox, Greasemonkey and the official del.icio.us extension to use it.
Not sure what Greasemonkey is? Read the description from my wordpress.com category resizer.
See the full list of [...]

How to fix the Firefox memory leak (Firefox hack)

Firefox memory leak? It doesn’t have one. Unfortunately, because of the way it’s configured to run out of the box it *looks* like it has one.
Follow these simple steps to get your Firefox memory usage under control.

These configuration changes are a trade-off between internet browsing speed and memory usage. They are most useful if [...]