betterblogger
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What's New
- Initial release
- mozdev.org
Release history:
- Bb0.1 - 6 April 04
Betterblogger: Using Greasemonkey to customize Blogger.com's GUI.
Download betterblogger.user.js
greasemonkey made most of the code I'd written obsolete in one fell swoop. Thanks, greasemonkey! As a result I have decided to turn this into a greasemonkey user script rather than an extension... if you can't beat em (and greasemonkey rocks, btw), join em.
The medium is the message?
With the advent of CSS and DHTML, the dominant web-coding paradigm shifted from table-mania to strict separation of presentation and content. As with any issue, there are numerous interpretations of how to do this. Blogger chooses the strictest separation: even bold and italic are <span>s with style properties applied. I found myself not using their handy little GUI buttons, because replacing <b></b> with <span style="font-decoration: bold"></span> seemed a bit excessive to me, and because I believe that in an information-theory sense there are times when bolding or italicizing some text is part of the message, not part of the presentation of the message... i.e. if that text shows up unstyled, information has been lost.
I also find that I have a number of tasks I repeat endlessly when using Blogger, pieces of code that could benefit from automation. For example, I attribute the source of an item with <span class="via">[via whatever]. The 0.1 release of Betterblogger adds a CTRL-SHIFT-V macro works similar to Blogger's link button: popups ask for the link and the link text, and the code is plopped into place.
To do:
- Figure out how to actually inject buttons into the Blogger GUI. The first version of Betterblogger, which was an extension, could do this, but greasemonkey code executes before the DOM objects have been instantiated. I'm working on finding a way around this that doesn't involve arbitrary-length setTimeout()'s.
- Add additional formatting buttons for various markup-heavy operations: gallery-style formatting for posts with a lot of pictures (such as tutorials), smart nested UL generation, and application of classes and styling to definition lists, ULs and OLs.
- Add enough functionality to justify the existence of this user script :)