Captain Oblivious

I'm sure any of the Lotus geeks who read this site already saw Julian's excellent LDD enhancement per Greasemonkey. On the off chance you've been hibernating this weekend, go check it out before you read the rest of this. It makes LDD's comment threads usable. Yes, really.

Now, some of us have been known (ok, just me) to poke fun at the comments implementation at Julian's own nsftools site. See, the comments there are hosted offsite, and to read them you have to either open a pop-up window or show just the comments in a new tab/window. It's a little unusual in the blogging world, but definitely not unheard of. Still, Julian's usually pretty damn near perfect, so any opportunity to cut him down to size, well...

Sooo, to make a short story long, I took Julian's LDDMonkey script and modified it to create a Greasemonkey script to deal with the comments on his site. I hereby present to you, the 8 readers of this blog, NSFToolsMonkey (or, as Julian prefers to call it, AssMonkey - you know, AssTools? Oh, never mind, trust me, there's a joke in there...):

http://www.captainoblivious.com/members/rob_mcdonagh/home.nsf/nsftoolscomments.user.js.

There is one interesting thing about AssMonkey - it uses the new GM_xmlhttpRequest functionality that allows Greasemonkey scripts to access multiple sites. Of course, that was really a requirement, since Julian's comments are, well, on another site. So it might go without saying, but I'm saying it anyway.

Update: Jake pointed out that my script was failing for him, along with the fix. Don't get me wrong - there wasn't a bug in the code. Heaven forfend. Like that could ever happen. Sheesh. Give me some credit. Wait, on second thought, skip that idea. Of COURSE there are bugs in the code. It's just that nobody's found them yet. No, the import statement (a key Greasemonkey element that identifies the site at which the script should be active) wasn't broad enough. The link above now includes a corrected import. If you'd rather make the change yourself, the difference is simply appending an asterisk to the http://www.nsftools.com/blog/*.htm entry. Specific blog entries are identified (permalink) with an anchor link (#04-16-05, for example). So an import statement like this works for all situations: http://www.nsftools.com/blog/*.htm* If, like me, you just go to the main blog page, you'd never notice this. But if you go directly from your RSS reader, you'll have trouble unless you apply Jake's fix.