Summary

The Greasemonkey script A Better eBay Filter has been updated to version 6.0. An eBay redesign caused version 5.0 of the script to completely fail. A significant rewrite of code was made in version 6.0 to restore proper operation.

A Better eBay Filter is a Greasemonkey script designed for users of eBay. It filters eBay searches to hide item entries from sellers who have a feedback score or positive percentage below values you specify, or above for feedback score, or Top-rated sellers. The input values can be dynamically changed to filter items into or out of view. Last-used values are saved between browsing sessions. Purchasers use A Better eBay Filter to winnow the display of auctions to sellers they want to bid with.

A Better eBay Filter may be downloaded either from the devoresoftware.com site or the userscripts.org site.

If you have questions about using the script, this is the place to post them.

Summary

Written by user request, this script for Google Reader marks an item as read if the title link is clicked, when in expanded view.

Honestly, I thought Reader already did that since it seems the most logical behavior, but I checked several times and situations by clicking a title link, and the item was not marked as read.

Detail

grclickedisread works by setting an event handler for all active title links that precede and follow the current item, as set by Google Reader. It starts at the first entry if no current item is set. The event handler is triggered by a click on the item’s title link, and simulates a click on the Mark as read checkbox for that item.

The script checks for Google Reader’s internal flag of which entry is the current item five times a second. The check frequency is not set to a higher number of checks to avoid performance issues with the script running too often. Setting the check frequency lower increases the possibility that a user will click a title link before the script has a chance to set an event handler for link.

It may happen that a quick scroll and click occurs too rapidly for the Google Reader Clicked is Read script to process, but this should be a rare event. Worst case is, for that click, Google Reader behaves as it does without the script, that is, the item is not marked as read.

Post here with questions, comments, or problems.

Summary

Written in response to an anonymous Elance user request, elancekiller is a Elance kill-file Greasemonkey script. The script removes from your view all Water Cooler forum posts by anyone whose ID you place in the script.

elancekiller will filter out the post by the ID listed and, if present, any replies to this post. It does not filter out the starting topic post, even if posted by an ID on the kill-file list.

To properly use this script, you must edit the list of killfiled users in the script to match your own preferences. Here’s what you need to do:

Go to line 19:

var killThisIDList = [

Three names I used for killfile testing are on the lines immediately following:

“e_rajk”,
“Elance_Victor”,
“devoresoftware”

Delete or comment out (with a leading //) those three lines and add the line containing the member’s ID you wish to killfile. If you have multiple people you wish to killfile, add each ID in quotes separated by a comma, with no comma after the last name. For example to killfile Elance_Admin and elance_garnor, you would add the lines:

“Elance_Admin”,
“elance_garnor”

These are only examples! I used Elance administrators so as not to single out any normal users. Almost certainly you do not want to filter out posts by these IDs.

Remember to save and reload the browser page using the newly modified script.

If you have any questions, you can post them here.

Summary

A user requested a script which would remove stars from Google Reader entries for matching tags. Edit the Google Reader Kill Stars For Tags script to set the tags you want unstarred. When activated, the script stars items loaded in the main items pane, for expanded view only, by simulating a mouse click on each entry with a matching tag. After Google Reader is loaded, from the browser menu choose Tools/Greasemonkey/User Script Commands/Remove stars in Google Reader for tags to process the loaded entries.

Details

Google Reader Kill Stars For Tags will remove stars on entries in Google Reader which match a particular tag. To make the script work properly for you, you will need to edit the source code to insert the item tags that you want to unstar. Look at lines 14-17:

var unStarThisTag = [
"favorite",
"favorites"
];

This is the list of item tags you want unstarred. Change the current tags to your preferred tags, placing each tag in quote and ending each line with a comma, except for the last tag line. The script will loop through each tag for each Google Reader item, attempting to match it to existing tags for that item. If successful, it will remove the star for the entry.

An important restriction is that you must be in expanded view when running the script. Unfortunately, list view does not contain the tag information and the script cannot work without that information. Also, remember that only items which are loaded into the pane will be processed, Google Reader Kill Stars For Tags cannot process entries which have not been loaded.

This script is dependent on the internals of Google Reader and future changes by Google or untested browser configurations may prove problematic.

Summary

The Greasemonkey script A Better eBay Filter has been updated to version 5.0. Recent eBay changes to their search webpage internals broke earlier versions of the script. Several changes were made to the script to restore full functionality.

A Better eBay Filter may be downloaded either from the devoresoftware.com site or the userscripts.org site.

Let me know if you have questions or problems.

The Greasemonkey script A Better eBay Filter has been updated to version 4.1 to support new eBay search links that were not recognized by previous versions of the script.

This is a minor change. One line was added to support additional links:

// @include http://www.ebay.*/sch/*


The script may be downloaded either from the devoresoftware.com site or the userscripts.org site.

Please post if you have any problems or questions about the script.

Summary

A user requested a script which would add stars to Google Reader for matching tags. Edit the Google Reader Make Stars script to set the tags you want starred. When activated, the script stars items loaded in the main items pane, for expanded view only, by simulating a mouse click on each entry with a matching tag. After Google Reader is loaded, from the browser menu choose Tools/Greasemonkey/User Script Commands/Make Stars in Google Reader to process the loaded entries.

Details

Google Reader Make Stars will star items in Google Reader which match a particular tag. To make the script work properly for you, you will need to edit the source code to insert the item tags that you want to star. Look at lines 14-17:

var starThisTag = [
"horse",
"cow"
];

This is the list of item tags you want starred. Change the current tags to your preferred tags, placing each tag in quote and ending each line with a comma, except for the last tag line. The script will loop through each tag for each Google Reader item, attempting to match it to existing tags for that item. If successful, it will star the item.

An important restriction is that you must be in expanded view when running the script. Unfortunately, list view does not contain the tag information and the script cannot work without that information. Also, remember that only items which are loaded into the pane will be processed, Google Reader Make Stars cannot process entries which have not been loaded.

This script is dependent on the internals of Google Reader and future changes by Google or untested browser configurations may prove problematic.

To specify the text you want in a link to be displayed, find lines 14- 17:

var showMatchingLinkTextList = [
"www.youtube.com",
"en.wikipedia.org"
];

This list of entries specifies the text which must be found in a link, for one or more matches. So any link containing http://www.youtube.com or en.wikipedia.org will show the full link text in brackets following the actual link.

Change or add the text you want see for a link, placed inside of quotes. You can specify as many text strings as you want; follow each line with a comma except for the last line. For example, to show links that have http://www.cnn.com in addition to youtube and wikipedia, use:

var showMatchingLinkTextList = [
"www.youtube.com",
"en.wikipedia.org",
"www.cnn.com"
];

to specify only links that have the text .blogspot.com somewhere in the link, use:

var showMatchingLinkTextList = [
".blogspot.com"
];

As with the original showlinks script, you will want to limit where the script is active by changing the @include line to the website(s) where you want to see the full link text.

Available on userscripts site or the home site.

Improved the HowlsOfOutrage Greasemonkey script for Firefox and added a native Chrome extension because Chrome didn’t work with the standard script (possibly due to a bug or bugs in Chrome, definitely due to its unexpected behavior).

Download:

Greasemonkey script/home site: http://www.devoresoftware.com/gm/hoo/HowlsOfOutrage.user.js

Greasemonkey script/userscripts site: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/78047

Chrome extension: http://www.devoresoftware.com/chromeext/hoo/HowlsOfOutrage.crx

Detail:

HowlsOfOutrage version 3.0 has two feature additions and is available as a native Chrome extension. An explanation of the changes follows.

The HowlsOfOutrage script could occasionally take a while to generate a favorites list, depending on response time on your end, on MetaFilter’s end, or somewhere in-between. Version 3.0 adds a “…loading…” message in the popup with a red background while it is accessing the favorites page and building the display.

Previous versions of the script would attempt to access the favorites page as soon as a mouse rolled over the favorites text. This could be suboptimal behavior if you quickly moved your mouse cursor down a page and triggered a number of extraneous favorites requests. (Bad mouse jitter on and off one posts favorites could lead to similar results). To avoid this situation, the script now waits one second after displaying each popup before honoring a new request for a favorites page.

Theoretically, the delay feature also helps with the server load on MetaFilter by reducing the potential number of unintended page accesses. To be honest, however, unless the number of users of the script were to increase by a few orders of magnitude, any excess server requests due to unintended rollovers would be lost in the noise of the huge number of normal server requests. Regardless, this script version is more “polite” in its behavior.

Finally, a native Chrome extension was created using somewhat different internal logic for part of the favorites processing. Technically, this is because Chrome does not seem (to me) to properly process document.evaluate() for a part of a document when the document fragment has not been appended to the body of the document.

Since HowlsOfOutrage’s release, three MetaFilter users have asked about an update to the script to support the MetaFilter plain theme which uses a white background. Because the original script did not explicitly set text color, the resulting text was hard to read for the optional color theme. This problem has been resolved with two other enhancements and is available on the home and userscripts site.

Detail

Version 2 of HowlsOfOutrage added text color of white to the script so that it was left as a default color, which did not work well with the plain theme. If you would like a different text color, for example black, you would change the line:

aNode.style.color = “white”;

to

aNode.style.color = “black”;

Two other changes were made. The popup box now sizes to the text inside it, i.e. the list of users favoriting a post. Just seems a bit more neat to me than the original quick hack, since I was in there messing around with the code anyway. If you really liked the original box, you can uncomment the line:

// favPopUp.style.height = “192″;

by removing the leading “//” and things should work as they did before.

Also, if you hover over a post, you will see the list of favorites from users, instead of it working for just the comments. Once again, cleaning things up a bit.

If you have questions or comments, please post them here. I don’t always monitor the userscripts site, plus it can have stability problems.

Download links: home site or userscripts site.