greasemonkey

  • Main
  • RSS 2.0

Moving Forward

We've got a whole host of new initiatives going on.

Sections:

Topics:

I've been buried with work and obligations. There is much to report. Expect to hear more here soon about veg-o-matic, blogging bootcamps, and new initiatives.

Bud posted this on March 26, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Greasemonkey: Becoming Less, Not More

User-agent XML scripting is a key enabling technology for remixing web content. For security reasons, the most recent release of greasemonkey doesn't allow you to use a large portion of firefox's native XML support in greasemonkey scripts. Using firefox as a centerpiece in remixes just got harder.

Sections:

Topics:

A few months ago, I announced the veg-o-matic project. We developed user scripts using Greasemonkey to then republish microformatted content into reblog 2.0 Alpha. The idea was to create a way of generating an attention stream that could be shared with a group of people. This attention stream would extend beyond material made available in RSS. For instance, members of a work group could extract contact information of an important sales lead (formatted using the hCard HTML microformat) from a web page and post it in their information stream for other members to use.

The advantage of using greasemonkey was that it allowed full access to firefox's exemplary XML-processing capabilities in a pretty easy-to-master scripting environment. For security reasons, the most recent release of greasemonkey doesn't allow you to use a large portion of firefox's native XML support in greasemonkey scripts. This change effectively breaks the front-end of veg-o-matic, and it is unclear there is an easy fix.

While I understand the developers' security concerns, it seems like one of the major selling points of using greasemonkey just went away without much compensation.

Update: The lead developer of Greasemonkey has posted a comment in which he assures me the removal of the XML processing capabilities is only temporary due to a bug. The one nit I would pick is that how to convert legacy code to the now-supported E4X, an emerging javascript standard for XML-processing, is not always obvious. Let me recommend this resource for it which got me going enough to realize the extent to which my stuff did not work.

Bud posted this on December 4, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

xFolk Veg-o-matic Alpha

We provide a way to surf the web and slice and dice information you find there into your own custom output stream.

Sections:

Topics:

The folks at Eyebeam and Stamen are getting set to release a public alpha of Reblog 2.0. Reblog now provides a web-based RSS reader and a way of republishing RSS items in light weight content management systems like blogs (currently Movable Type and WordPress). The new version is going to expand on that functionality by allowing people to collect microformatted items in web pages and republish them in a variety of formats.

In other words, Reblog is becoming like a Veg-o-matic for information. It slices and dices information into the stream you want. By default, you can publish this stream as a web page or various types of RSS feeds that can in turn be republished in a blog.

Right before Labor Day, I released a pre-alpha version of a greasemonkey script, aka xfolk-veg-o-matic, that takes advantage of this architecture. The script scans a web page for all instances of xFolk microformatted content and adds widgets to them so that readers of the page can republish them in Reblog. For those unfamiliar with xFolk, it is a microformat for tagging links and creating distributed social bookmarking systems. This post explains how to install and use the alpha version of the script that will be packaged with Reblog 2.0 Alpha.

Continue reading "xFolk Veg-o-matic Alpha"

Bud posted this on October 16, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Veg-o-matic: An alpha web service using xFolk

“It slices, it dices ...” More specifically, this post presents an alpha release of a web service based on greasemonkey and reblog that identifies, validates, cleans, and republishes xFolk microformatted content. All comments are welcome.

Sections:

Topics:

I'm releasing a very alpha hack of an xFolk web service for this labor day weekend. Recall that xFolk is a microformat for representing the sort of social bookmark data you would find on a site like del.icio.us. A lot of people are republishing their links from such sites in their blogs. The advantage of using a microformat like xFolk for this sort of thing is that it makes it easier to write software to do something useful with the data.

The hack I am presenting here is a combination of a greasemonkey script and an alpha version of the reBlog refeed tool by eyebeam research and stamen design. The main action of interest is in the greasemonkey script that:

  • Finds all instances of xFolk microformatted content in a page.
  • Determines which of those instances are valid (i.e., contain all the required elements as indicated in the xFolk spec).
  • Creats a clean clone of the xFolk entry that only contains elements specified in the spec.
  • Uses an xml object to serialize the cleaned clone into a form element for republishing.
  • Adds a script to the valid xFolk instances that makes it possible to republish their “cleaned” version via Mike Migurski's alpha rewrite of the reblog republishing tool released by eyebeam and stamen

Continue reading "Veg-o-matic: An alpha web service using xFolk"

Bud posted this on September 2, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)