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The Gmail Greasemonkey API

Google has put up a page for people writing Greasemonkey scripts to rearrange the Gmail interface. "Google acknowledges that some people are going to change their own experience of our web applications regardless of what we do. Resistance, as they say, is futile. It would also be somewhat hypocritical. After all, a Google employee wrote Greasemonkey in the first place, another wrote these scripts to add functionality to Gmail, and a third wrote two books on the subject (and these docs). Instead, we would like to provide a little help to make such scripts more robust."
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The Gmail Greasemonkey API

Posted Nov 7, 2007 23:15 UTC (Wed) by sylware (subscriber, #35259) [Link]

Shall we have the same for youtube?... in order to get rid of flash...

LWN too?

Posted Nov 7, 2007 23:40 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

Don't know about YouTube, but Jon, we could use something like this for LWN so we can implement killfiles as userscripts for those threads with that certain je ne sais quoi.

musings on forum killfiles

Posted Nov 8, 2007 1:42 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

In the past I have successfully used privoxy's regex rewriting rules to completely remove the
detectable presence of certain users from web forums via all web access from my network.
Regex solutions are a royal pain, especially on html, and are brittle and fail when the site
makes slight changes.  But when it worked, the result was fantastic.  Those comments simply
did not exist.

Of course this was on forums where the threads were purely linear (which made divergent
discussion near-impossible) which made it easier to remove the unwanted items.

I also accepted the brittleness and difficulty of the solution.  I liked that I would have to
feel it was really and truly important to silence someone from my screen, rather than having
it be a trivial decision.  Of course this was a fairly personal decision.


musings on forum killfiles

Posted Nov 8, 2007 9:57 UTC (Thu) by Wummel (subscriber, #7591) [Link]

Note that XPath matching is as brittle as a regular expression matcher. Both will fail when the site structure is changing. Only difference is that XPath is easier to work with in an (X)HTML world.

So with regard to matcher brittleness there is no advantage using greasemonkey over a filtering proxy solution.

musings on forum killfiles

Posted Nov 12, 2007 2:21 UTC (Mon) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

Well, failures might be trivial style changes done in an oldworld direct-attribute way.  Or
sometimes even html source formatting changes, depending upon your regex.

I mean, I encountered these.  It was possible to create regexes to avoid suffereing from some
of this, but it wasn't simple.

LWN too?

Posted Nov 8, 2007 4:48 UTC (Thu) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link]

You might want to check out:

http://www.proven-corporation.com/~jhs/lwn/

Pete

LWN too?

Posted Nov 8, 2007 14:26 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (guest, #774) [Link]

Seems like no longer works (doesn't distinguish between guests and subscribers) after the
recent LWN changes.

LWN too?

Posted Jul 17, 2008 13:48 UTC (Thu) by jhs (subscriber, #12429) [Link]

Hey that's my script!  Oh man, I'm ashamed that it took me six months to notice that my regex
stopped working due to changes in the LWN presentation.  Truth be told, I tend not to read the
longer threads anyway.

At any rate, I have updated the script to match the new version, and hopefully LWN will add my
announcements into their next weekly edition.  You can download the new script at the URL in
the parent or by searching for "lwn.net" at userscripts.org.

Youtube-dl

Posted Nov 14, 2007 17:19 UTC (Wed) by shlomif (subscriber, #11299) [Link]

See youtube-dl for a way to download the YouTube Videos to your local computer. Don't know if it covers all the functionality you were looking for.

Youtube-dl

Posted Nov 16, 2007 21:16 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I'd quite like a way to view embedded YouTube videos in Konqueror, the way 
those damn Firefox users can. :)

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