Saturday, September 24, 2005

My first GreaseMonkey script

Following yesterday's post on editing comments in Blogger, I took some time to write a greasemonkey script for adding a link to edit comments.

Friday, September 23, 2005

Editing blogger comments

Ok, once I am a little more active about posting to this blog, I get spam comments. I did not want to block anonymous posting because I have previous feedback from friends saying that they want to post comments but don't want to log on to Blogger. So do I have to put up with spam comments?? No, but all I could do previously was to (rudely) delete the whole comment post, leaving some others scratching their heads about why a comment was deleted (it only shows up in my blog as 'comment deleted').

By default Blogger does not have a link to allow me to edit comments, it only has a trash can icon allowing me to delete comments. Google brought me to the Blogger templates site, which has a quick hack to bring me to the edit comments page.

On closer inspection, basically the hack works on the fact that comment posts are also identified by blog ID and post ID. The trash can icon link contains these information, but it is for the delete-comment.g URL. The Blogger template hack simply replaces the URL to post-edit.g. Hmm, maybe I can try my hand at writing a simple GreaseMonkey script to add the edit comment link beside the trash can icon. That will be for later. :)

[update] Found a blogger comments editor at userscripts.org, but it seems to only add the link to the page for adding new comments.

[update2] Ok, I was ignorant, just learnt that Blogger has a feature to turn on captcha (word verification) feature for comments.

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del.icio.us as a cognitive engine?

del.icio.us is a popular and good site for tagging, and many people have devised many different ways to use it. The categorisation method I have recently started using in this blog is also based on the tagging ability of del.icio.us, a blogger hack I learnt from FreshBlog.

As I stumbled on Typo just now, I suddenly discovered another use of del.icio.us : when you come across a new site and don't know what it is all about, the fasted way to find out about it is not to read the description on the site, but to try to bookmark the site using del.icio.us. This is because when you try to bookmark the site (typically using the 'remember this' bookmarklet), del.icio.us will display the form for you to tag the site, along with the recommended tags that del.icio.us thinks that will be relevant for this site (I guess this is based on tagging by other users).

As a result, at a glance you will know the possible tags that this site could fall under, and this can tell you a lot about the site. Take the Typo site for example, when I clicked my bookmarklet, the recommended tags are:

ajax blog blogging blogtool development engine framework opensource programming rails ruby rubyonrails tool tools wordpress

Apparently these are tags taken from my existing tags, but the important thing is that del.icio.us immediately told me a lot about typo based on tags I understand - tags I use. Within 2 seconds, I can conclude that Typo is a blogging tool, opensourced, based on ruby on rails and is somewhat related to wordpress (substite or enhancement, that I will have to find out by reading more on the Typo site).

So del.icio.us can sometimes even be turned into a cognitive engine to tell me about a site before I need to read anything from the site, and the best part is it tells me this by using tags I use.


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Nokia N91

My mobile contract expired this week, and I started to look around for new phone models I can buy (hopefully), and I came across the Nokia N91, which is really a phone that has EVERYTHING I ever wanted (so far) in a phone. Too bad Nokia also just announced recently that this model is going to be delayed to early 2006. The price is going to be too steep for my liking to, judging from the estimate I see from this article from infosyncworld (look for the estimated price at the last paragraph.

Scott Laird has been tracking N91 pretty well, a good reference site for knowing what has been happening with this phone.

Another thing I learnt from Scott's blog is that there is this new blogging engine known as Typo based on Rails (maybe even RoR) with quite a lot of good features out of the box.