some useful things on the internet

[eruthros]

1. Are you, too, frustrated by the new lj facebook and twitter connect buttons under your comments? Fear not, for not one but two people have made magical solutions! Do not mess with tab order or people shall make greasemonkey scripts, lj. These solutions only fix your view of the page and your tab-order; other people in your journal will still see the facebook/twitter options, and will be able to crosspost their comments.

Option one: daluci wrote a greasemonkey script that takes away all the facebook/twitter connect buttons. Yay! It only works on the quick-comment page, though, not on the full reply page. ETA: Now it works for all comment pages! People are awesome.

Option two: chagrined describes a partial solution using stylish here. This is useful for: people who use stylish (me!), people who have javascript turned off on lj (also me!) because the above greasemonkey script only works on the java-enabled quick comment boxes. Sadly, however, it still leaves "settings" the first tab select after the comment box. Me: tab-enter ... oh damn. NARGH.

2. While I am linking to greasemonkey scripts for livejournal, I also really love daluci's bannering script. It turns the lj header back into a beautiful quiet blue bar. Against which I can read the text. Sometimes it gets a little wonky over on the right, depending on what lj has done with the custom header, but I just adblock the second lj logo and call it done.

3. Yesterday sineala linked to some macros that astolat made in like 2007 that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere, so I thought I would signal boost them. It's a set of fanfiction conversion macros for Microsoft Word; they turn a story or post written in Word into pretty html or plain text, surrounding italicized text by html tags and stuff like that. (I can't tell from the post itself whether they also fix inappropriate characters like smart quotes and em dashes, but they might.) ETA: sineala confirms in comments that the macros fix em dashes and smart quotes and other special characters.

Comments

[such_heights]

My hero, thank you!

[sineala]

Thanks for the greasemonkey scripts!

I can confirm that Astolat's scripts do in fact convert all the special characters. Smart quotes get plain-ified, and em-dashes get converted to their HTML equivalent. (Double dashes are also turned into the HTML em-dash, but that's easy enough to fix later.)

[eruthros]

Oh, awesome! That's great. Smart quotes are evil.

[sineala]

They are! I don't know why Word has them on by default, of all things. Grr.

I also recommend Scrivener for Mac users; it has a menu option to fix all the smart quotes in a document in addition to being able to switch it off in word-processing preferences. (And a menu option that will asterisk your *italics*, which is useful for those fandoms that still use pure plaintext for mailing lists and archiving.)

[chagrined]

I came up with a way to make the greasemonkey script work on the full reply page but I can't get it to work on both with the same script. XD But probably that is b/c I don't know for javascript, so I passed on this knowledge to daluci who hopefully will be able to find some way to combine the two of them to produce a new, improved script which can do EVERYTHING. (And if not, there can just be two separate scripts.)

But now I have stayed up too late poking at code I don't understand and I really should sleep. XD

ETA: daluci figured it out! It's working on all pages now :D :D

[eruthros]

\o/ you rock! Mostly I am glad I have js turned off on lj by default, because everyone else is describing hideous popup boxes around the comment form, which I don't have to see. But otoh, no quick reply box for me :( So I was sad for a while there.

[plazmah]

This is the greatest post ever.

[sasha_feather]

Thanks for this post! I have tweeted it and sent people over.

[missmollyetc]

Thank you for the link to that script! Oh, LJ. How so made of fail?

[sc_fossil]

I'm sorry to ask this, but what is a greasemonkey script and where does one put it? Thanks! I do use Firefox. I went to that linked page of daluci but I don't see anything there but two empty comment blocks, one with the link block and one without. Are there instructions? Sorry to be so frellin' dumb.

[eruthros]

No problem! Greasemonkey is an add-on for firefox that lets people customize websites in various ways and borrow other people's customizations. So to install daluci's scripts, first you would have to install Greasemonkey (link above), then restart firefox, and then you should see an "install" button on the top right-hand corner of daluci's userscript page. After it's installed, it should work automatically; if not, there are greasemonkey options available in tools -> greasemonkey -> manage user scripts.

There are a lot of other useful scripts for greasemonkey at userscripts.org; for example, I use one that marks comments since my last page refresh as new on dw and lj.

[sc_fossil]

Okay, thanks! Now that makes sense. *g* I'm already ready to learn.

[sethrak]

::face-palm:: Found this through looking for links on how to handle this problem - and stupidly included a link in my own post without asking first. I'm sorry. Would you prefer I remove it, or may I leave the post as-is?

[eruthros]

Oh, no problem! Links to public posts are always okay.

[mecurtin]

How do I convey my love to daluci? For now I am a HAPPY camperette.

[livrelibre]

Thank you!

[livrelibre]

Thank you!