Greasemonkey Scripts I Want

Thought I’d toss out something just to make sure I didn’t forget how to type. These are Greasemonkey scripts that would be nice to make or find already made:

• Blogger Blog Link Emblem The deal here would be to add the Blogger icon () to any link that pointed to something at *.blogspot.com. Very useful for harvesting potential Blogs of Note. Extra props if it could do the same for blogs not hosted on Blog*Spot, but the logistics of that get tough.
• You’re Already Subscribed To This I’m on a boardgaming kick, and as such I’m assembling boardgaming blogs in Reader. I can’t remember which blogs I’ve added, though, so I have tried to add the same ones multiple times. Often I read several posts before I realize that I read them all before. If I go to a blog I already have in Reader I’d like to see a message pop up so I don’t try to add it again. (Update: Mihai whipped it up! Sweet!)
  
• Social Bookmark Niagra It would be cool to have a Greasemonkey script that added all the social bookmarking icons to every page I read, cuz sometimes people forget to put them all in. Then I have choices! Will I del.icio.us this one? Or maybe send it to Furl? ONLY THE BEST SITES GET SENT TO GETBOO.
  

Plan 9 From Outer Space

Just finished consuming Ed Wood, an entertaining picture about the infamous director, when I found that his magnum opus, Plan 9 From Outer Space, is available on Google Video for free. It’s an epic story, sincerely executed. And — if you overlook the parts that are batshit insane — it’s a telling cautionary tale about the dangers of raising the dead to combat weapons of mass destruction.

Beautiful Comments Form

More fun than blogging is redesigning my blog. So I’m working on that. I’ve decided this template is not representative. Early comments are positive…

I’m mentioning this because, once again, Mr. Powazek is super-inspirational. Take a look at the comments form from his photo site, Ephemera. The little thumbnail of the photo at the top is brilliant.

I love to gaze at good designs like this (and these) and wish I had teh hotx skills.

Testing Web Pages

I feel compelled to make a quick shoutout for JWebUnit, a unit testing framework for web pages. Basically, it’s an embedded Java HTTP client that allows you to programmatically access URLs, inspect pages, manipulate forms, and click links.

This is useful because it lets you write tests against web app behavior. So, if you change, say, Blogger, you can run tests to ensure that it’s still possible to post and comment, and that the access control works, and that posts show up right, etc.

I’ve — up until now — mostly scoffed at automated web testing. This is because it really doesn’t address design concerns, and doesn’t do heavy lifting on issues like cross-browser compatibility.

But, I’ve been working a bit on the Blogger comments form, and I have to admit I’m really quite pleased to have the confidence in my changes that passing the automated tests gives. If you’re curious about why this is necessary, play around with your comments settings and access the comments page in various states of logged in and not. Given all the possible combinations, it’s really necessary to ensure that each little permutation works the way it’s supposed to.

So, I’m pretty happy, but one major flaw in JWebUnit is that it doesn’t let you change hidden form fields. While this is authentic in that well-behaved user agents don’t let users change hidden form fields, but I’d much rather have tests to make sure that if a curious or malicious user did start playing around with those, the app would behave reasonably, or at least blow up without letting anyone do anything they shouldn’t.

Super-Mega Blogger Shiny!

I’m pumped that a widget I made just got released in the first volley of Google widgets for the Mac OS X Dashboard! You can use it to publish to your Blogger blogs. I posted a full introduction over at Blogger Buzz.

This was a lot of fun to do both programming-wise (something I posted about before) and design-wise. It gave me a chance to exercise my limited — but growing — Photoshop skills to make the window and buttons. Gradients are totally my friends now.

I like the Dashboard design philosophy of get in quickly, do something straightforward, and get out. The widget is paired down to the minimum settings (which blog, and whether to show the title field… “sorry” to those who like the link field) and minimum operations (save draft and publish). You can make things bold and italic with the obvious key commands, but there’s no toolbar. I even dumped resizing and a scrollbar for simple auto-expand (though this may be revisited).

I think this works well because the widget can leverage the full Blogger editor through the “Save as Draft” button. When you click that, the post gets saved, and a link pops up that can take you directly to editing that post in the Blogger app. So if you get part way through a post and realize you really want to add an image, you can do that easily by jumping over to Blogger.

So that’s that. I hope you find it stylish and useful. I’ll be keeping up with the Google widgets group to follow any bug reports or feature requests.