hoodwink.d enhanced
RSS
2.0
XHTML
1.0

RedHanded

MouseHolin' Yer Writeboards #

by why in inspect

How do you keep track of your various Writeboard documents? (I guess you can’t have created too many in the half-day since its launch.) Still, the day will come. Why not manage your Writeboards through MouseHole?

MouseHole shows the various Writeboards that you've created.

Here’s how to get it working:

  1. Make sure you’re running MouseHole as proxy.
  2. Visit the Writeboard user script and MouseHole will assist you in installation.
  3. Begin adding Writeboards at http://mh/writeboards/.

See, here’s some incredible advantages over Greasemonkey and any other competition I’ve encountered. MouseHole allows user scripts to act as full web applications. In this case, the writeboard feeds are watched and applicable IDs and tokens are stored in the script’s own database.

Secondly, MouseHole can use that database when rewriting web pages! So, whenever you visit a Writeboard, you see subtle text in the corner indicating if the page is watched or not. If not, a link displays which offers to watch the page. I mean, geez, this toupee has a very snug fit. (Anyway, glad to hear of the Writeboard launch.)

03 Oct 2005 at 17:02 | 9 comments

why

said on 03 Oct 2005 at 17:34

If folks are interested, possible todo:

  • RSS feed, changes for all watched.
  • Optional storage of passwords.
  • Auto-fill your username to new writeboards.
  • Support all of RedCloth’s rules in documents.

Rick Feynman

said on 03 Oct 2005 at 18:15

Holy Awesome!

Jeevan

said on 04 Oct 2005 at 00:46

Very nice. I’m finally starting to see the point of this hoodwink.d/mousehole thing you all have been talking about. :)

Julien Couvreur

said on 04 Oct 2005 at 16:03

A Greasemonkey userscript can also watch for writeboard IDs and tokens, store them and display them as part of the page.

Could you clarify what can be done with MouseHole than cannot be done with Greasemonkey? I’m missing the “incredible advantages” ;-)

why

said on 04 Oct 2005 at 16:54

Julien: Can Greasemonkey host web applications? MouseHole has a “doorway” where scripts can mount applications. When you visit http://mh/writeboards/, for instance, you get the screen displayed above. It may seem like a minor advantage, but I’m discovering that it’s a big deal.

Can GM write content into non-existant resources? If so, then I guess you could mimick this. Anyway, I’d really love to know.

Julien Couvreur

said on 04 Oct 2005 at 22:23

I don’t think you can write content on a non-existant resource directly, although something like that has been discussed, but you implement a writeboard list page in other ways.

Some that come to mind:
  • when clicking the “Looking for a writeboard” link, just generate the page and display it by setting the body.innerHTML or DOM manipulation (see Google Butler’s help page for example),
  • same as previous but display it by navigating to a data: url that contains all the content,
  • use a special querystring parameter to trigger the replacement of the page with a custom version.

There is a feature that was discussed but isn’t currently implemented that would allow to replicate the MouseHole behavior: allowing for custom “about:” urls. In this case, you’d use a script that runs on http://writeboard.com and about:writeboards (or something similar).

David

said on 05 Oct 2005 at 00:40

This is mighty cool, _why. Rock on!

why

said on 05 Oct 2005 at 07:54

Okay, Julien, good answers. The about: URLs would be stellar, something that can be typed into the URL bar easily.

David: Yes, but the script is like 300 lines, 1/3rd the size of Writeboard itself. And I’m okay with that! (A tale of excess.)

porges

said on 17 Oct 2005 at 02:32

Ack, how long until hoodwink.d is fixed?

Comments are closed for this entry.