greasemonkey

So my old pal Sam (@svdodge) tweeted about an annoying feature of Twitter…

Now, Sam’s a smart guy, but I wondered if at what level this “feature” annoyed him… He may have been joking, but he did offer to pay (a small amount) to have this “feature” removed.

When I come across something I don’t like, I want to change it. I want to fix it, I want to make it not annoy me.

Luckily, with the web… this is possible. It’s possible due to the work others have done who felt the same way, who felt that users should be in control of their experience.

So I followed up with the following, suggesting a Greasemonkey or Stylish solution:

But that wasn’t enough for me.. so in the tradition of Let me google that for you I headed over to userscripts.org, found a script, installed it, tested it, and tweeted again:

I hope it works for you Sam!

Now, as for the reason I did this? It wasn’t just to help a friend, and it wasn’t to show off how damn smart I am (I mean, that’s questionable, right?) The reason I did it was because I believe in keeping the web free and open. I believe in building a better Internet, and helping people take control.

These ideas align with those of Mozilla, btw… and it’s one more reason I’m sticking with Firefox as my browser (and Mozilla) instead of abandoning it for Chrome or Safari, or another browser created by a for-profit company interested in controlling my browsing experience. Mozilla was there for us, they saved us from the big bad IE Monster, and helped keep the web open and free, and they’re still doing that, and I want to help them… If you want to join me, get in touch.

I’ve uploaded a Greasemonkey script to Userscripts.org. It’s called WebGrader Link Rewriter and it takes the goofy Javascript used by WebGrader.com and makes real links you can click on and open in a new tab/window. I made it because the developers of the site wrote what I consider poor code.

I should note that I contacted the company that develops WebGrader a few weeks back and said I could suggest improvements in their system, and they replied to me pretty welcoming. I have not gotten back to them yet, as I’ve been busy, but writing this script took me about 10 minutes. (Yes, I pretty much copied an existing script someone wrote to fix Haloscan comment links.)

Userscripts.org looks pretty awesome for those of us who want to put fixing sites into our own hands. I would like to be able to choose a license when uploading a script but hey, I’ll forgive that for now. (Maybe it’s all public domain? I dunno…)

I do worry that Greasespot “The weblog about Greasemonkey” hasn’t been updated since May 2007. I hope it’s not abandoned. Then again, I should look around more, since I’m new to this. There is also a wiki at wiki.greasespot.net I should explore.