modding del.icio.us, part one.

[catechism]

While I was writing my last ridiculously long post, it occurred to me that my my Firefox is insanely modded, and my del.icio.us is insanely modded, and that maybe I should write a post discussing the things we can do to make del.icio.using easier. I am on a Mac, using Firefox 2.0.0.14. This post is full of screenshots, CSS and javascript

Comments

[murklins]

I don't mod del.icio.us itself much anymore, though I used to. I do mod the bundle management page and the posting interface, though, so I'll talk about those.

The bundle management page

In my personal account, I like to keep everything bundled. I haven't done any bundling in a while, though, so there are many orphan tags hanging around. Without modification the bundle management page is styled such that unbundled tags are hard to pick out. Unbundled tags are the ones that are not outlined:



I use a Stylish script that I adapted from the Bundle-management dimmer GM script to make the unbundled tags pop out:



The script is very basic and looks like this (take it if you want -- works on both Mac & Windows):

@-moz-document domain(secure.del.icio.us) {

#bundle-edit .used {
color: grey !important;
border: 0 none black !important;
}
}
Now in a different account that is used by a lot of people, we don't bundle all the tags -- we have a certain class of tags, pairing tags, that are too numerous and in flux to bother bundling. With the bundled tags dimmed out, things generally look like this:



Since we are adding new pairings everyday and we haven't designated anyone to handle bundling on a regular basis, when we occasionally remember to bundle the tags, we need all the bundled tags to be greyed out, but we also need all the pairing tags to be greyed out. For that I made a GM script specifically for this account that greys out any tags that have a forward slash in them, because only our pairing tags have that formatting. Now it's easy to see that FourYearStrong needs to be bundled into the CrossoverFandoms bundle:



Probably that's fairly useless for the rest of the world, but if you have a similar case where you want to grey out tags based on their naming conventions, you could mod that script to make your own variation.

The posting interface

I mostly use the official del.icio.us extension, v 1.2 to add links to my personal account, since it works cross-platform so I don't have to develop different habits for home and work. It has some feature deficiencies, though, which I correct with GM scripts. Here's what my slightly tweaked posting interface looks like:



1. The Anal Retentive Character Counter adds that link that says "check for large chars" and it also adds those character counters to the description and notes fields. The most basic use of this script is to monitor your char count as you type. If you hit save and it detects that you're over the limit, it will toss up an alert to say that your notes are going to get cut off and you can either cancel out or go ahead and save anyway. It's a lifesaver for anyone who hates it when their notes get truncated.

2. The del.icio.us URL Cleaner adds that second link, and it also adds that yellow highlighting to the url field anytime it detects a "dirty" url. Dirty urls are those with parameters, like ?style=mine, or anchors, like #cutid1. When you click the clean url link, it strips those out of the url, so that you can easily post only clean LJ links to del.

I was so enamoured of this feature that I decided to add it to the del.icio.us Complete extension, which I use to bookmark things to any of my secondary del accounts. My URL Cleaner for del.icio.us Complete extension sits on top of del.icio.us Complete and adds the Clean URL link to it.

[murklins]

Oh, man! I am not done. I just recently wrote a GM script that makes any tags with forward slashes in them stand out. This is totally useful for fanfic links, because when you're scanning down a page with lots of different fandoms or pairings, the link titles don't always have that info in them, and the tags are generally in any old order, so figuring out what each link is about can be slow & hard on the eyes. We pretty much universally use the forward slash in pairing tags, though, which means that it's possible to programmatically identify them just by looking for that slash. Then you can style them to pop out a bit: preview image.

You can install the script from here. I'm still sort of testing it out as I use different parts of the del.icio.us site.

[murklins]

Ahaha, I totally thought I was making these comments into the void -- this post is SO OLD and I am TALKING TO MYSELF. I should have had more faith in everyone's obsession. :)

[catechism]

You are not talking to yourself! You are talking to me!

Though, I guess, many times, that is an awful lot like talking to yourself. Hmmm.

[wistfuljane]

Finally tested this out - and btw, it works on Opera too, yay! Now that I know a faster way to edit a GM script by navigating the GreaseMonkey menu itself, I customized the emboldener links so that they would be something other than bright blue and fit better with my del.icio.us skin:

Right-click GM icon > click "Manage User Scripts..." > select "slashtagemboldener" & click Edit at the bottom > edit this part with the html code of the color of your choice: tag_a.style.color = "#00f";

Yay, you are awesome, murklins! Thank you!

[murklins]

Yeah, that Edit button is so handy! I am always messing with things that way. (Like today, when I made this hideous but functional replacement to the Thread Unfolder script that *just* adds an Expand All option, since the Expand links that LJ provides now make the individual Unfold links unnecessary. What did I do before GM? My life browsing experience must have been so limited.)