World disintermediation, one hack at a time
Further to my Delicious CSS post, here's a javascript bookmarklet to make adding delicious css tags that much easier:
Just drag it to your bookmarks toolbar somewhere, and click to use.
Unfortunately, the latest version of the delicious tag form doesn't accept
tag arguments in the URL, which is what we need to preset the delicious_css
tags we need. To workaround this, you need to also install the
Auto-Fill Delicious Tag Field
greasemonkey script.
And from the quick-weekend-hack department ...
Ever wanted to quickly add a style to a page you were on to make it more usable? If you're a Firefox user with Firebug installed you can do that directly, but it's a temporary and local-only solution. User stylesheets are more permanent, but at least in Firefox (as I've complained before) they're relatively difficult to use, and they're still a single-host solution.
I've wanted a lightweight method of defining and applying user styles on the network for ages now, and this weekend it struck me that a simple and relatively elegant hack would be to just store user styles as delicious tags, applying them to a page via a greasemonkey script.
So here it is: available at userscripts.org is a
relatively trivial Delicious CSS
greasemonkey script. It looks for delicious bookmarks belonging to a list
of specified delicious usernames that are tagged with
delicious_css=<current_domain>,
and applies any 'style tags' it finds on that bookmark to the current
page.
Say if for example you wanted to hide the sidebar on my blog and make the content wider, you might do this in CSS:
div#sidebar { display: none }
div#main { width: 100% }
To define these rules for Delicious CSS you'd just create a bookmark
for www.openfusion.net with the following tags:
delicious_css delicious_css=www.openfusion.net div#sidebar=display:none div#main=width:100%
Note that since delicious tags are space-separated, you have to be careful to avoid spaces.
The general format of the style tags is:
ELT[,ELT...]=STYLE[;STYLE...]
so more complex styles are fine too. Here for example are the styles I'm using for the Sydney Morning Herald:
div.header,div.sidebar,div.aside,div.ad,div.footer=display:none div#content,div.col1,.span-11=width:100% body=background:none
which turns this:
into this:
And to setup a new machine, all you need to do is install the Delicious CSS greasemonkey script, adjust the usernames you're trusting, and all your styles are available immediately.
I'll be setting up my userstyles under my 'gavincarr' delicious account, so you should be able to find additional examples at http://delicious.com/gavincarr/delicious_css.
I've been playing with using delicious as a lightweight URL database lately, mostly for use by greasemonkey scripts of various kinds (e.g. squatter_redirect).
For this kind of use I really just need a lightweight anonymous http interface to the bookmarks, and delicious provides a number of nice lightweight RSS and JSON feeds suitable for this purpose.
But it turns out the feed I really need isn't currently available. I mostly want to be able to ask, "Give me the set of bookmarks stored for URL X by user Y", or even better, "Give me the set of bookmarks stored for URL X by users Y, Z, and A".
Delicious have a feed for recent bookmarks by URL:
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/{format}/url/{url md5}
and a feed for all a user's bookmarks:
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/{format}/{username}
and feeds for a user's bookmarks limited by tag(s):
http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/{format}/{username}/{tag[+tag+...+tag]}
but not one for a user limited by URL, or for URL limited by user.
Neither alternative approach is both feasible and reliable: searching by url will only return the most recent set of N bookmarks; and searching by user and walking the entire (potentially large) set of their bookmarks is just too slow.
So for now I'm having to workaround the problem by adding a special
hostname tag to my bookmarks (e.g. squatter_redirect=www.openfusion.net),
and then using the username+tag feed as a proxy for my username+domain
search.
Any cluesticks out there? Any nice delicious folk want to whip up a shiny new feed for the adoring throngs? :-)
A few weeks ago I hit a couple of domain squatter sites in quick succession and got a bit annoyed. I asked on twitter/identi.ca whether anyone knew of any kind of domain squatter database on the web, perhaps along the lines of the email RBL lists, but got no replies.
I thought at the time that delicious might be useful for this, in much the same way that Jon Udell has been exploring using delicious for collaborative event curation.
So here's the results of some hacking time this weekend: Squatter Redirect, a greasemonkey script (i.e. firefox only, sorry) that checks whether the sites you visit have been tagged on delicious as squatter domains that should be directed elsewhere, and if so, does the redirect in your browser.
Here's a few squatter domains to try it out on:
The script checks two delicious accounts - your personal account, so
you can add your own domains without having to wait for them to be
pulled into the 'official' squatter_redirect stream; and the
official squatter_redirect delicious account, into which other
people's tags are periodically pulled after checking.
Marking a new domain as a squatter simply involves creating a delicious bookmark for the squatter page with a few special tags:
squatter_redirect - flagging the bookmark for the attention of
the squatter_redirect delicious usersquatter_redirect=www.realdomain.com - setting the real domain that you
want to be redirected tosquatter_domain=www.baddomain.com - marker for the
squatter domain itself (only required if you want to use from your own
delicious account)So www.quagga.org above would be tagged:
squatter_redirect squatter_redirect=www.quagga.net
# or, optionally:
squatter_redirect squatter_redirect=www.quagga.net squatter_domain=www.quagga.org
Feedback/comments welcome.