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 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 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.

Due to all the extra (possibly very long) text that is added for each link, you will want to limit where the script is active by changing the @include line to the website(s) where you want to see all full links. Otherwise, your browser display may look very messy.

Available on the userscripts site, or on the home site.

The Greasemonkey script A Better eBay Filter has been updated to version 4.0 to allow filtering sellers by Top-rated seller status, by user request. A checkbox was added to the script status line which turns off and on the Top-rated seller filtering option.

Background Information

A Better eBay Filter is a Greasemonkey script designed for users of eBay. It filters eBay listings and 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 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.

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

Summary

A request was posted on Ask MetaFilter for a script to clear starred items in Google Reader. I wrote the Greasemonkey script Google Reader Kill Stars to address the problem. When activated, the script clears all stars in Google Reader for items loaded in the main items pane by simulating mouse click on each starred entry. After Google Reader is loaded, from the browser menu choose Tools/Greasemonkey/User Script Commands/Remove Stars in Google Reader to clear all those pesky stars from loaded items.

Summary

A request was posted on Ask MetaFilter for a Greasemonkey script to sort subscription feeds by unread count. Following discussion with the user, I created the script Google Reader Sort Subs, which adds Up and Down buttons in the Google Reader Subscriptions pane to sort display of feeds by unread item count, either in ascending or descending order. The script has been tested as working with Firefox on Windows XP and Mac OS X.

Detail

The Google Reader Sort Subs (GRSS) script depends on particular Google Reader internals, both structure and id. As a consequence, any changes by Google to their Reader product may cause the script to fail, at which time you can check here about an updated script. Sometimes I do not know a script is broken until a user posts feedback, so reporting a problem may well help other people besides yourself (most script users do not report problems they have with scripts).

GRSS attempts to locate two elements with the ids sub-tree-item-0-main and sub-tree-header. Because these elements are built dynamically, the script will spend up to 30 seconds trying to locate the elements after the page loads before it gives up and ceases execution.

Assuming GRSS does successfully find the two elements, it adds two buttons: Up and Down to the Subscriptions pane of Google Reader (typically the lower left pane). Obviously, these are not the most descriptive buttons, but space is really tight in the Subscriptions pane, so terse is good. Clicking on the Up button will sort all feeds in ascending order of unread count. Clicking on the Down button will sort all feeds in descending order of unread count. Subfolders are respected, in that sorting will occur within the folder itself and feeds will not be moved outside their parent folder.

Only folders with unread item counts will be sorted by the script.

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