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Slashdot Firefox Extension 293

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the fun-and-useful-hacks dept.
christopherfinke writes "I've been working on Slashdotter Firefox extension for Slashdot users, and version 1.2 has been approved by the Mozilla admins. Features include the ability to auto-add cache links after story links (from any of Coral Cache, Google Cache, or Mirrordot), a quick-reply feature that adds a 'Reply' option to the right-click menu when you select text in a comment, the option of styling all of Slashdot's pages like a chosen Slashdot section, links in the comment sections that allow you to toggle open/closed all of a comments replies, and more. All of Slashdotter's features are optional, and the extension is compatible with Firefox, the Mozilla Suite, Seamonkey, and Flock."
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Slashdot Firefox Extension More

Slashdot Firefox Extension

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  • Features (Score:5, Funny)

    by donnyspi ( 701349 ) <junk5 AT donnyspi DOT com> on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @04:23PM (#15013379) Homepage
    Does the extension automatically remove dupes and fix typos in the titles of submitted stories???
    • Yes. Click this link for a sample of the dupe free Slashdot link [this-page-...-blank.org]

    • Re:Features (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @04:42PM (#15013547) Journal
      If it parsed the story tag "dupe" (which actually are in DIV's using the CSS class "tags", so they should be identifiable), and could associate these tags with their detailed story (DIV's with CSS class "details"), these DIV's can then be hidden by applying the appropriate collapsing "display:none" style, and if you've got this far, possibly also add a link to expand these collapsed stories if you're still interested.

    • Re:Features (Score:4, Funny)

      by Yst ( 936212 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @04:47PM (#15013583)
      Or, for that matter, would the plugin author consider providing functionality which would systematically add dupes and typos to other sites using Slash, so as to bring them into closer conformity with Slashdot's standards and make them more familiar in appearance and function to a Slashdot-acclimatised audience?
    • Does the extension automatically remove dupes and fix typos in the titles of submitted stories???

      I think an auto reply "this is a dupe" might be in order. Along the same lines as "reply to selected text", which seems to be working fine here.

    • Re:Features (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Wannabe Code Monkey ( 638617 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @04:53PM (#15013621)

      Does the extension automatically remove dupes and fix typos in the titles of submitted stories???

      No, but I just used it to reply to your post, and it works pretty well. In the quick reply section of the preferences, I put this in for my format:

      <p><i>%s</i></p>

      And it works great.

      • Does the extension automatically remove dupes and fix typos in the titles of submitted stories???

        No, but I just used it to reply to your post, and it works pretty well. In the quick reply section of the preferences, I put this in for my format:

               

        %s



        And it works great.

        Now if it would auto-escape HTML tags . . . ;)

    • The real question is: When will this new extension automatically insert Soviet Russia and Beowolf cluster jokes?

      I'm going back into hiding now...

  • This is awesome. The greasemonkey script that adds mirror links keeps bugging out. I hope this will work better.

    Also, I think the replies are AJAX. Woo
    • Hmm... Looks like the select-text replies aren't AJAX, but it turns the reply to this link into an AJAX-enabled thingy.

      Now we just have to wait for the VCs to come along and dump millions on the poor guy for using the word AJAX.

      • Re:Awesome (Score:5, Informative)

        by christopherfinke ( 608750 ) <chris@efinke.com> on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @04:29PM (#15013436) Homepage Journal
        Looks like the select-text replies aren't AJAX, but it turns the reply to this link into an AJAX-enabled thingy.
        The AJAX replies feature isn't for replying to comments, it's for those links that say "X Replies below your threshold." It makes it so you don't have to load a new page to see those replies.
        Now we just have to wait for the VCs to come along and dump millions on the poor guy for using the word AJAX.
        Woohoo!

  • At First Glance (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dante Shamest ( 813622 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @04:26PM (#15013406)

    I thought this extension allowed me to slashdot sites while I browse. :O)

    Seriously though, I like this feature:


    * You can choose to have all Slashdot pages styled like one of Slashdot's sections. For example, if you're a fan of the Games section's hideous purple and black color scheme, you can have every Slashdot page look just as horrifying!
    • Seriously though, I like this feature:

      Well I think that this section is going to be lost to people using the reply to selected text feature. But I am a big fan of the styling. I got really tired of the green look. But it could have been easier by just making it a user preference, since many of us are probably auto-logged in.

  • Opera? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Poromenos1 ( 830658 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @04:26PM (#15013415) Homepage
    Why doesn't anyone make any Opera js scripts? :(

    • Re:Opera? (Score:5, Informative)

      by appavi ( 679094 ) <saravanannkl AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @05:07PM (#15013727)
      Opera 9 Beta supports greasemonkey scripts. Greasemonkey scripts should work in opera as is or with some minor modifications.

    • Re:Opera? (Score:4, Informative)

      by pAnkRat ( 639452 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2006 @04:36AM (#15016575)
      I wrote a bookmarklet, which I personaly use in Galeon, but it should work in all Moz* browsers.
      If you hover over the comment Link (#15013415) it will pull the moderation results for this post with xmlHttp, and display the result table in a DIV tag, beside the current post.
      The bookmark name is "slash mod"
      The URL is:
      (AFAIK this should all be in one single line.)
      javascript:(function(){ var currentUrl =''; function h(event){ var url = 'http://' + this.host + '/comments.pl' + this.search; if(currentUrl == url){ var theDiv = document.getElementById('kwsmodding'); if (theDiv != null) { theDiv.style.display='block'; } } else { var req = new XMLHttpRequest(); req.open("GET", url, false); req.send(""); var resultText = req.responseText; var tableText = '' + resultText.split('data_head">')[1].split('')[0] + ''; var theDiv = document.getElementById('kwsmodding'); if (theDiv == null) { var theDiv = document.createElement('DIV'); var mybody=document.getElementsByTagName('body').item( 0); mybody.appendChild(theDiv); theDiv.style.zIndex=100; theDiv.style.backgroundColor='grey'; theDiv.id='kwsmodding'; theDiv.style.position='absolute'; theDiv.style.backgroundColor='grey'; theDiv.style.display='block'; } theDiv.innerHTML=tableText; theDiv.style.right='30px'; theDiv.style.top=(event.pageY - 20 ) + 'px'; theDiv.style.display='block'; currentUrl = url; } event.preventDefault(); } function hout(event){ var theDiv = document.getElementById('kwsmodding'); if (theDiv != null) { theDiv.style.display='none'; } } var xpe = new XPathEvaluator(); var nsResolver = xpe.createNSResolver(document); var result = xpe.evaluate('//li/div/div/a[contains( @href , "comments" )]', document, nsResolver, 0, null); while (res = result.iterateNext()) { res.addEventListener('mouseover', h, false); res.addEventListener('mouseout', hout, false); } })();
      Once this is added to the bookmarks you can use it in the following way.
      • go to slashdot
      • pick story
      • click "read more"
      • after the page has finished loading, klick the Bookmark
      • mouse hover over a Comment Url (normaly the last part of: " by Poromenos1 (830658) Alter Relationship on 23:26 28 March 2006 (#15013415)" in the Comment header)
      • wait a sec.
      • read result
      • mouseOut the let the table dissapear again.
      The code does some cacheing, if the users hovers/mOuts the same link a few times, the URL request is done only once.
  • very nice, i've been using 1.1 since last week. helped a couple of times with dead links.

  • What about IE? (Score:5, Funny)

    by aw232 ( 904545 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @04:28PM (#15013425)
    Aren't you going to make one for IE? How about IE7?
  • ...that gets added to your posts whenever you use the contraption.
  • links in the comment sections that allow you to toggle open/closed all of a comments replies, and more.

    Thank you. Sometimes I don't even want to see the flames the come after a person makes an unpopular comment. Nice job.

  • Yay!.. Taco did you see that? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CptnHarlock ( 136449 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @04:31PM (#15013459) Homepage
    I've been hoping for Taco to include the "colapse thread" feature for a long time. I still think it should be native instead as in the form of a plugin - then everyone could (and probably would) use it.

    It would make it a lot easier to find the next real comment after a comment tree created by some Troll post... Another positive thing is that we'd get rid of the "high positioning" replies that normaly end up in the first tree. Are you listening Taco?.. :)

    Cheers!..

    • The times they.... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @06:05PM (#15014209) Homepage Journal
      You're right about needing to be able to skip a comment tree. You don't even need a fancy collapse feature — just a link that means, "go to the next comment at this level". I often don't bother to look at popular stories because I know I'll never have the patience to find my way past all the trolling, irrelevent jokes, and shoot-from-the-lip flame wars that the initial posters always indulge in.

      This wasn't such a big deal when I started following Slashdot 5 years ago. But there are a lot more users now. It's really pathetic when any popular site is unable to evolve with the times — but when it's Slashdot, you want to cry.

      • Re:The times they.... (Score:5, Funny)

        by Nimey ( 114278 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @08:19PM (#15014965) Homepage Journal
        I set any comment modded "funny" at -6 in my preferences. That cut down on a lot of the garbage.

        I see a great need: a Bayesian function on this extension to automagically "mod" comments; e.g. anything with the word "Micro$oft" or "M$" modded at -4, free ipod spam at -6, and so on.

      • Re:The times they.... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Sentry21 ( 8183 )
        That's why you browse at Score: 3. There are a lot less crappy posts, no trolls, and just plain less to read. Ever since I started browsing at threshold 3, Slashdot has been a lot more managable. I don't understand why people complain about things like this when the solution has been here for years. Try it, you'll like it.

      • This issue isn't complicated to solve. When you leave your comments Threaded, slashcode displays some random crap comments for no other reason. Try this: set your comments to "Nested" and "Oldest First", and set your threshold to "+3". It's slashdot nirvana.

        For whatever reason, Nested does what you'd think it should do. Top level posts are all the way on the left of the screen; direct replies are underneath. Setting your threshold to +3 has the following benifit: Before the karma counter ran on the Bil
    • There are greasemonkey scripts [userscripts.org] to allow collapsing threads. [userscripts.org] And scripts to collapse stories [userscripts.org]and remove sidebars [userscripts.org] and figure out how much time you waste [userscripts.org]on /. and add mirrors [userscripts.org] and whatever else you want on slashdot. [userscripts.org]

      I'd give them a look before I demanded the slashcode [slashcode.com] writers add features you want (or write the code yourself and submit it to slashcode), unlike other news sites [digg.com] this is an OSS project.

  • It's really quite nice (Score:5, Informative)

    by A Dafa Disciple ( 876967 ) * on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @04:31PM (#15013460) Homepage
    This was the first I had heard about this exstension. I've been using it for the last half hour or so and I'm very pleased. It really does make browsing /. here a more enjoyable experience.

    I find some of the additions of the extension to be things that really should have be built into /. anyways, such as things that you find at Digg [digg.com] like AJAX comment retrieval - things that are not at all hard to implement that can dramatically increase the user experience. Nevertheless, I'm not really too surprised by /.'s apparent slowness in embracing new web technologies considering how long it took them to simply make this site fully standardized in CSS

    One negative aspect of the extension, however, is that it seems to me that, depending on the feature set you have enabled, /. pages in general now take a bit longer to load, but not so long that it makes the plug-in not worthwhile, especially since it facilitates the speed of navigation in other ways.

    All of you should check this out for sure!

  • Feature Request (Score:4, Funny)

    by OnlineAlias ( 828288 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @04:31PM (#15013461)
    I for one would welcome an insert "imagine a beowolf cluster" or "welcome our evil overlords" or "netcraft confirms" or "all your base are" or "in soviet russia" button. That would be great.

  • Wow! (Score:2)

    by Otter ( 3800 )
    ...links in the comment sections that allow you to toggle open/closed all of a comments replies...

    That's a feature I've long wanted -- every time some early bird gets a +5 for some offtopic spraying about Iraq or creationism that pulls 200 responses, I wish for it yet again. Thanks, developers!!!!

  • Does it have First Post button? (Score:5, Funny)

    by chia_monkey ( 593501 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @04:35PM (#15013493) Journal
    Does it have a First Post button? Imagine the millions of man-hours per day saved by people hitting that button rather than typing all that manually.
    • Does it have a First Post button? Imagine the millions of man-hours per day saved by people hitting that button rather than typing all that manually.

      But what would do people with that saved time then ?
    • Imagine the millions of man-hours per day saved by people hitting that button rather than typing all that manually.


      Funny, it reminds me of an idea I had thought about previously. Why not have a "first post this comment" while you're typing, so that it will encode the string inside your comment with steganography?
  • I feel a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of slashdotters cried out as the restarted firefox at once...
  • All of Slashdotter's features are optional, and the extension is compatible with Firefox, the Mozilla Suite, Seamonkey, and Flock.

    What about Camino [caminobrowser.org]? Don't forget the Mac fanatics!
    • What about Camino?
      Depending on how big the differences between Camino and Firefox are, it may work already, but I'll have to find someone with a Mac who will either test it for me or let me test it before I can list Camino as a supported browser on the Mozilla Addons site.
      • I'll try it out when I get home from work. Camino has the Firefox engine underneath and using the Cocoa framework for the user interface. Beyond that I'm not sure since I'm starting to get into Mac programming myself.

    • Re:Missing one... (Score:5, Informative)

      by appavi ( 679094 ) <saravanannkl AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @05:15PM (#15013820)
      Camino doesnt support extensions.

      From Camino FAQ [caminobrowser.org]

      Q. Does Camino support Firefox extensions?
      A. No, and it never will. Firefox extensions rely on XUL (a user interface toolkit made by the Mozilla Foundation) to interact with the user and draw their interface. Camino uses Cocoa (an interface toolkit made by Apple) and does not support XUL.

      Also from the interview [gigaom.com] with Camino Project lead Mike Pinkerton

      We recognize this is a problem for our users, but extensions only exist because of the cross-platform UI layer upon which Firefox is built. It's that same cross-platform UI layer that makes Firefox feel "wrong" on Mac OS X. Camino's use of Cocoa for the user interface makes it fit in with the rest of the platform, but prohibits us from using extensions. We feel this is a trade-off worth making. That said, we are investigating ways to allow non-user-interface extensions to register and work correctly.
  • Funny, funny. I'm blocked by Websense [websense.com] from downloading this extension - or any Firefox extension from addons.mozilla.org [mozilla.org] here in the bowels of Iraq.

    But obviously I can still post to /. Someone has some incredibly skewed priorities.
  • Where is the 'First Post' button, that guarantees a First Post in the story?

  • I installed this and used the 'Reply to Selected Text' feature. It inserts 'blockquote' tags. Shouldn't it insert 'cite' tags? I like my quotes to be italicised, not just indented. Indentation does not seem to be proper quoting to me.

    I went under the Preferences and changed the Quick Reply Format. But it got me thinking what is the difference between blockquote + adding italics and simply the cite tag?
    • and simply the cite tag?


      Ah, so THAT's what you guys used! I didn't know and used the <i> tag instead.
    • I installed this and used the 'Reply to Selected Text' feature. It inserts 'blockquote' tags. Shouldn't it insert 'cite' tags?
      That's up to you; you can change the reply format in the Slashdotter options dialog.
  • Don't take this as a complaint - rather a matter of curiosity - why is the extension not compatible with the current nightlies? I find many useful extensions aren't and they're taking longer to update to be compatible with this release than others in the past. I presume it will be at some point, so why not now - is this a particularly nasty task?

    I look forward to using the extension when it is.
    • why is the extension not compatible with the current nightlies?
      Mostly because I don't use the nightly builds and thus wouldn't be testing on them. Is it possible to install them without upgrading my installation of 1.5.0.1? If so, I'd be happy to test it on them and post a compatible version of the extension.
  • Other features include automatic flogging of Authors for posting duplicates. I.Q. filter, so we won't see any of Zonk's posts. Oh, and bad grammar maker. Gotta have that.

  • Thank You (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Spad ( 470073 ) <slashdot.spad@co@uk> on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @04:50PM (#15013605) Homepage
    All of Slashdotter's features are optional, and the extension is compatible with Firefox, the Mozilla Suite, Seamonkey, and Flock.

    As a Seamonkey user, I'm really sick of Firefox extensions that refuse to work because the author couldn't be bothered to check them properly, so thank you for taking the time.
  • Seems hazy if an author should be allowed to submit a story to /. about his own project.

    • Re:Legitimate story? (Score:5, Funny)

      by thrillseeker ( 518224 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @05:07PM (#15013730)
      Seems hazy if an author should be allowed to submit a story to /. about his own project.

      Yeah, we wouldn't want anyone knowledgeable about a subject starting threads.

    • Yeah, I'm getting sick of all these stories relating to that Linus dude and his pet "Linux" project.
    • Better that the author submits the story as this guy did rather than submit it under a pseudonym praising "some other guy's" extension.

      I think it deserves to make front page as it did anyway; for people who aren't interested, fair enough - it's just another story you aren't interested in. For people like myself and many others who had never heard of this extension, it's great that we've now been informed.

  • cool :) props to you. I like it.
  • Automatically delete the comments (and replies) with goatse and similar links, please!

  • What a great extension - it just made it straight onto my (fairly short) list of installed Firefox add-ins.

    One minor request: any chance we could customise the reply to selected text option? At the moment, it just seems to wrap everything in blockquote tags, which doesn't necessarily yield well-formed HTML, and might not match someone's preferred quoting style.

  • The one thing that irritates me about slashcode is the "slow down cowboy!" with that mandatory waiting period before you can reply. If my karma's high enough, it's a good assumption that I'm not going to post nonsense, and that in fact I have something to say with a quicker response time. Slashcode apparently thinks otherwise. I don't liek the fact when I have something to say, I have to wait x amount of minutes before posting it.

    It also discourages meaningful, brief replies if the time between "reply" and
    • An intentionally implemented feature is not a bug.

      I could pander until my karma was high, and then bombard slashdot with posts. Could have hundreds before my karma was lowerd.

      In the 'olden' days when they first implemented karma and it was apoint system, I aklways felt your karma should be subtracted from the number of seconds you are forced to wait.

      It is still a wait, but not as bad. Before subscription, I also thought it would be neet if people with a karma over 40 got to see the next story first.

  • Greasemonkey Script can make it pretty... (Score:3, Informative)

    by GeekLife.com ( 84577 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @05:32PM (#15013968) Homepage
    I altered someone's greasemonkey script a bit. It unitalicizes all the article text, changes all the fonts to sans-serif, makes the page fixed-width to help with unending, unreadable length lines of text, and fiddles with a few font sizes for better readability.
    // ==UserScript==
    // @name Slashdot: italics swap, topic skin
    // @namespace
    // @description
    // @include http://slashdot.org/*
    // @include http://.slashdot.org/*
    // ==/UserScript==
     
    function addGlobalStyle(css) {
        var head, style;
        head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
        if (!head) { return; }
        style = document.createElement('style');
        style.type = 'text/css';
        style.innerHTML = css;
        head.appendChild(style);
    }
     
    addGlobalStyle(
     
        ".intro { border: solid thin #FFFFFF;padding: 10px; background-color: #FFFFFF; color: #555555; font-style: italic; line-height: 155%; font-size:13.5px; }" +
    ".intro a { color: #338833; text-decoration: none; }" +
    ".intro a:hover { text-decoration: underline; }" +
    ".intro i { color: #000000; font-style: normal; }" +
    ".topic img { position: relative; top: -25px; }" +
    ".storylinks { font-size:11px;}" +
    ".details { font-size:11px;}" +
    "#frame { font-family:sans-serif;width:960px;margin:15px auto; }"
     
    );

  • Thank God... (Score:5, Informative)

    by identity0 ( 77976 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @05:53PM (#15014135) Journal
    Slashdot's comments section has such a broken UI, I was actually thinking the other day to write a program to help me navigate it. Props to you for making that unnessisary.

    I have some ideas about what is broken on Slashdot. Some of them would require actual site modifications to fix, other could be fixed with a browser extention.

    If you want more bugs, how about:

      - When I'm in the post writing screen, there is no text of the story or link to it, so I have to open Slashdot in another tab and go to the story to read it.

      - The comments index is very, very broken. The "threshholds" concept's three drop-down menus (-1:5), (Threaded/Nested/Flat/No comments), (Oldest 1st/Newest 1st/Highest 1st/Oldest 1st Ignore threads/Newest 1st Ignore threads), and the "Comments spill at 50" concept interact in bizzare ways such that I don't even know what it's *trying* to do.

      - I *hate* the fact that comments below your viewing threshhold are listed at the bottom of the thread level instead of between the posts that it was replying to and got a reply from. So you sometimes see people seemingly reply to themselves, or flaming others, but they are actually replying to something below your viewing threshhold. I've seen arguments start this way, because someone thinks a flame was directed at them instead of to the AC that replied to them earlier. Please. for the love of god, put in an indicator if there is a post below the threshhold that a post is replying to.

      - I would like to be able to view the whole comments section as a threaded, subject-only(that is, no expanded posts) view, and open up individual posts which will open up in a nested, all-open veiw. Perhaps allow right-clicks on post titles should allow you to open up the comment and its follow-ups with any pre-specified threshhold options?

      - Instead of three drop-down menus in the comment index, how about a list of rules which we can rearrange the order of to make settings? Might require AJAX.

      - Slashdot's user prefs allow me to "bias" the moderation towards funny, or informative, or other moderation types, but it is a PITA to change it for each story. Some stories I want to read in "funny" mode, others I want to read in "Informative" mode. I should be able to change the bias to one of several presets like on an Winamp equalizer on a per-story basis.

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