eruthros: A panel from a 1950s educational comic book showing a communist deflating -- I mean, blowing up, the Washington Monument (Communists!)
eruthros ([personal profile] eruthros) wrote2010-08-31 11:51 pm

some useful things on the internet

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: [personal profile] 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 [personal profile] sineala linked to some macros that [personal profile] 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: [personal profile] sineala confirms in comments that the macros fix em dashes and smart quotes and other special characters.
such_heights: amy and rory looking at a pile of post (Default)

[personal profile] such_heights 2010-09-01 04:04 am (UTC)(link)
My hero, thank you!
sineala: Detail of The Unicorn in Captivity, from The Hunt of the Unicorn Tapestry (Default)

[personal profile] sineala 2010-09-01 04:34 am (UTC)(link)
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.)
sineala: Fred (from Young Wizards); the text reads "let's just call him Fred" (Young Wizards: Fred)

[personal profile] sineala 2010-09-01 04:54 am (UTC)(link)
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: Marvel comics: zombie!Spider-Man, holding playing cards, saying "Brains?" (brains?)

[personal profile] chagrined 2010-09-01 05:35 am (UTC)(link)
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
Edited 2010-09-01 12:10 (UTC)
plazmah: Abstract circle and square with "plazmah" underneath (glee: mercedes)

[personal profile] plazmah 2010-09-01 01:21 pm (UTC)(link)
This is the greatest post ever.
sasha_feather: Retro-style poster of skier on pluto.   (Default)

[personal profile] sasha_feather 2010-09-01 01:52 pm (UTC)(link)
Thanks for this post! I have tweeted it and sent people over.
missmollyetc: by trascendenza (Default)

[personal profile] missmollyetc 2010-09-01 03:45 pm (UTC)(link)
Thank you for the link to that script! Oh, LJ. How so made of fail?
sc_fossil: (Default)

[personal profile] sc_fossil 2010-09-01 06:56 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
sc_fossil: (The Lads by K)

[personal profile] sc_fossil 2010-09-01 07:32 pm (UTC)(link)
Okay, thanks! Now that makes sense. *g* I'm already ready to learn.
sethrak: Filia Ul Copt, head and shoulders (Filia)

[personal profile] sethrak 2010-09-01 08:32 pm (UTC)(link)
::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?
mecurtin: John and Rodney say WTF?! (wtf)

[personal profile] mecurtin 2010-09-01 10:28 pm (UTC)(link)
How do I convey my love to daluci? For now I am a HAPPY camperette.
livrelibre: DW barcode (Default)

[personal profile] livrelibre 2010-09-03 12:31 am (UTC)(link)
Thank you!
livrelibre: DW barcode (Default)

[personal profile] livrelibre 2010-09-03 12:32 am (UTC)(link)
Thank you!