Dotjs — hack the web

I've sneakily been using this for months on Hacker News itself- I just .hide() stories past around story #15. More signal, less noise. And it's just jQuery, so it's really easy to whip up.

Bonus points for it being so easy to share, too: https://github.com/holman/holman-js/blob/master/news.ycombin...

sant0sk1• 15 years ago

Same here. Mine:

1) sniffs out urls in submissions and auto-links them

2) adds comment thread folding.

https://github.com/sant0sk1/dotfiles/blob/master/js/news.yco...

pavel_lishin3• 15 years ago

I use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hockhafcdegocajmjh... for (2)

forgotusername• 15 years ago

It's interesting how perspectives differ on what is considered noise. On the average day I start my browsing here around link 15, or even the new queue.

You're pretty much guaranteed to hear of anything hitting the front page anyway if it was meaningful to begin with. If not, it's probably some momentary obsession or buzzword bingo (say, "Google", "Social", "Facebook killer", "Privacy", "Product launch" to take an ephemeral example :))

alsocasey• 15 years ago

I'll add bitcoin to that list.

yread• 15 years ago

I quickly scan http://hckrnews.com/ which makes sure I don't miss any upvoted story. It does have a lot of noise, but going through 20 or so articles since last time i looked doesn't take that long

SupremumLimit• 15 years ago

I just look at the top 50% on hckrnews.com. That seems to work for me, even though I'm not usually after the buzzword-of-the-day stories.

blago• 15 years ago

Awesome, exactly what I needed. I was just about to create yet another "inject X.js" bookmarklet.

oldgregg• 15 years ago

I'm waiting for someone to build a social browser extension on top of something like this. Anyone could submit custom CSS/JS for a website and the most upvoted "theme" automatically gets loaded. Sure the JS security issues might be a nightmare, but the web would look soooo much prettier!

mburns• 15 years ago

http://userscripts.org/

reustle3• 15 years ago

Requires Ruby? Why...

defunkt4• 15 years ago

Chrome extensions can't access the local filesystem so we have to start a tiny webserver in the background.

If someone knows a way around this limitation, or a simpler webserver to require / embed, I would be thrilled. But so far this is the best I've found.

seanp2k3• 15 years ago

ahahahahah what? Dude, do you work for Microsoft? "Well see, we just have to run MS-SQL server (DESKTOP OMG EXPRESS ENGINE) here, and then we run IIS on top of it to serve this file listing..."

aboodman• 15 years ago

Did you investigate requesting the files directly from the filesystem, like "file:///home/monkey/.js/google.com.js".

You'd need to tell users to enable file access for the extension though chrome://extensions/, since that isn't enabled by default and users have to opt into it. I also don't know if there is a way to get the current user's homedir without hardcoding it.

Also: you're being super careful to not allow arbitrary reading of the filesystem, right? A good sanity check would be to ensure that realpath() of any file served is under ~/.js before handing it off.

mgurlitz• 15 years ago

It looks like Ruby is only needed for the file server. You could easily substitute a Python file server (cd .js; python -m SimpleHTTPServer 3131). You could use a remote Apache server for synchronizing your scripts. I agree that Ruby is a little overkill, but it is simple enough to run easily on a Mac, and it is extensible for hackers.

defunkt4• 15 years ago

If you use your own server make sure you set the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header:

https://github.com/defunkt/dotjs/blob/master/bin/djsd#L26

(Also, Ruby comes with OS X (just like Python) so it seemed a sane choice.)

guptaneil• 15 years ago

Sounds like a relatively easy way to replace dependence on Ruby would be to just load the scripts directly from one's GitHub repo, where all your scripts can be easily synchronized.

gue5t• 15 years ago

This seems like it's a lot of overhead for what amounts, in terms of capability, to a reimplementation of greasemonkey. It also makes you implement finer controls on execution by url yourself, whereas greasemonkey has them in its syntax. The author states,

"GreaseMonkey user scripts are great, but you need to publish them somewhere and re-publish after making modifications. With dotjs, just add or edit files in ~/.js."

but this caveat is just as strong for files you maintain outside of your browser, and some browsers' implementations of userscripts/greasemonkeylikes actually have a similar filesystem-based model for managing scripts already.

While respectable, I had hoped to be more impressed by a tool that beckons me to "hack the web".

defunkt4• 15 years ago

That's all true, but dotjs is only for Google Chrome on OS X.

Google Chrome on OS X has no such filesystem-based model for managing scripts.

wahnfrieden• 15 years ago

True, and this is why I love dotjs. Thanks for making it!

Maybe a good followup project would be to use some of the dotjs code to help make a filesystem-based GreaseMonkey system for Chrome, which would be just as easy to manage as dotjs scripts are.

seanp2k3• 15 years ago

So actually it's much worse than Greasemonkey.

Also, with GM you can just save the script with the same filename and it'll use that instead.

This project is 100% useless.

ericmoritz• 15 years ago

You know that once a user script is installed in chrome you can edit the script.js file in the extension's directory on the fly. It's a little more work than simply putting a file in ~/.js but it doesn't require a HTTP server to function.

seanp2k3• 15 years ago

Yeah, already have greasemonkey and the only thing I have to do to "publish" files is to save them with the same name.

This project is a lot of work for zero benefit.

TheMiddleMan• 15 years ago

"GreaseMonkey user scripts are great, but you need to publish them somewhere and re-publish after making modifications."

Publish them where? I don't understand this. Whenever I change a user.js file and save it the browser updates it and it's ready to go next time the page reloads.

Side node: Scriptish is a fork of greasemonkey with many cool extras. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scriptish/

omaranto• 15 years ago

Doesn't Chrome have builtin support for Greasemonkey scripts? How is this better? Is it just the convenience of having jQuery preloaded?

Brewer• 15 years ago

This just made my day, keep up the good work.

meow• 15 years ago

Umm.. is there a way to run it on windows :( ?

pavel_lishin3• 15 years ago

Looks like you'll have to modify the Rakefile to use whatever Windows uses to launch the webserver. If you don't have ruby, you could probably write one in your local language of choice.

sim0n• 15 years ago

Sweet! Believe it or not I've been actually looking for something like this for Chrome over the past couple of days so this is great.

antihero• 15 years ago

Why does this need OSX?

pavel_lishin3• 15 years ago

It seems like a pretty trivial little hack - I think the only reason it really requires OS X is to launch the toy web server that serves the scripts.

robinduckett• 15 years ago

Sorry, how is this different to greasemonkey?

JackWebbHeller• 15 years ago

Great work! But I had some trouble getting it to run on my Mac.

I think it might be because I use VirtualHostX - http://clickontyler.com/virtualhostx/ - which alters my hosts file. I had to create a host - http://dotjs/ - pointing to my ~/.js/ folder - then edit the Extension JS to point the Ajax to http://dotjs/ instead of http://localhost:3131. A bit of pain but it might just be who this affects.

mph• 15 years ago

I added CoffeeScript support if anyone's interested.

just change your file extension from .js to .coffee

https://github.com/eightbitraptor/dotjs/commit/20c97774eb29f...

tung• 15 years ago

See also jsshell[1] for Chrome. Press the button and you can run jQuery-powered JS on the fly, save snippets and run them, even automatically on regex-matched URLs.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kmgmkbicahmbceidoi...

jasonkit• 15 years ago

I think the ruby web server is not necessarily needed, simply change the dotjs.js's content to

$.get(chrome.extension.getURL("script/"+window.location.hostname+".js"), function(script){ eval(script); });

it will look for the js file in the extension directory instead of the local ruby web server, and this should work for any platform. To take the ~/.js convenience, a symlink in *inx system or shortcut in window will do the job.

Sym3tri• 15 years ago

I wrote a simliar extension for CSS.

It's free in the Chrome store: http://goo.gl/vWcqr

Dotjs — hack the web

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