phil ringnalda

Back in the day, you could monkey with what you put into Blogger’s BlogThis popup by just sticking HTML into the URL that your bookmarklet built: I was very fond of a version that enclosed the quoted text in an italic blockquote (when I didn’t know from semantics). Then, some evil person (or maybe stevej) decided to put literal “ characters around whatever you pass in for text, so you would get a rather silly “<blockquote>Foo</blockquote”. So, I forgot about it, other than having someone ask me every month or two “why can’t I have that BlogThisBlockquote anymore?”

Then, this evening, I got to thinking that I should really do something with Greasemonkey that I can actually finish, to balance off my half-done scripts. When I thought about annoying things I could fix, the very first thing that occurred to me was the incredibly annoying interstitial ads that Yahoo Groups throws in your face when you are least likely to be interested in seeing an ad: I sometimes see them while following a link to an old post, when I want to see the post, not an ad, but mostly when I’m administering a list, which usually means deleting a spam message and kicking the spammer. The interstitials mostly seem to be for Yahoo Personals, and I have to admit to getting a tiny bit of satisfaction from screaming “No, deleting spam doesn’t make me horny!,” but I’d really rather not ever see another: I’ll absolutely never click one, so they are just pure annoyance. Of course, before I started, I checked the wiki and discovered that someone beat me to it.

So, my second choice: blogthis.user.js. As the explanation in the file itself, that I stole from Mark, says: install the Greasemonkey extension if you haven’t already, then when you follow that link you’ll have an active “Install User Script” item in your Tools menu, and once you do and accept the default in the popup, every time you pop up a BlogThis window (either from my right-click extension, or from the bookmarklet) the “what you selected” will be changed to <blockquote><p>what you selected</p></blockquote> with a couple of newlines at the end, so you’re ready to start typing after the quote.

I don’t doubt there are bugs in it (I fixed two just while writing this post), and since I don’t use Blogger for anything but testing, I doubt I’ll find them: that’s your job, to find them and tell me about them. Luckily, user scripts are easy to update: just install it again right over the top.