Greasemonkey + Ruby = MouseHole

September 3, 2005 1:34 AM

You've heard of Greasemonkey (which allows you to remix web pages in firefox), you might also remember the Ruby Programming Language that all of the cool kids are talking about these days. Mix the two together, make it useable through any modern browser (using a proxy), and voila MouseHole!
posted by freshgroundpepper (9 comments total)

Interesting. It does make me wonder if the same idea (that is, having a proxy that does the page rewriting rather than the browser) couldn't have been created to use Javascript. This way the large repository of Greasemonkey scripts would be available to anyone using any browser.

For all I know maybe a Ruby script could be written for this that will inject Greasemonkey scripts into any given webpage. It would certainly increase this application's utility - I'm sure there's many IE and Opera users who would appreciate access to GM scripts.

FGP - nice find, I'll be keeping an eye on this to see how it develops.
posted by dodgygeezer at 2:13 AM on September 3, 2005

Ugh. What I meant by "increase this application's utility" was that it would immediately make it more useful.
posted by dodgygeezer at 2:22 AM on September 3, 2005

I definitely agree with dodgygeezer, that this app would be much more likely to take off if it could incorporate Greasemonkey scripts. It probably wouldn't be that hard of a ruby script to write really.

It's good to see all of these tools for working with the web sites users view. To those of us who work with this sort of stuff it seems to be so easy and obvious that you can remix web sites that it's odd that it has taken this long. That's not at all to say that these tools aren't innovative, just that the concept behind them seems pretty obvious.

The writer of this app, Why the Lucky Stiff, is a pretty interesting fellow himself, the writer of the funniest and most bizarre programming language text I've ever read; Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby, click 'Ruby' in the FPP for the Mefi thread for it.
posted by Rictic at 2:43 AM on September 3, 2005

> couldn't have been created to use Javascript. This way the large repository of GreaseMonkey scripts

Greasemonkey is a browser plug-in that edits the FireFox Document Object Model (DOM) of the parsed web page in a browser. If this is a "web proxy" standing between the browser and a web site, then the FireFox DOM is unavailable.

To make a "GreaseProxy", you'd have to embed the FireFox engine inot the proxy and render the received HTML to a DOM in order to edit it with greasemonkey scripts before sending it to the browser.

The advantage of a proxy is you could make it a shared web site.

Some discussion about this I googled up:
mnot’s Web log: Greasemonkey and the Web
posted by dand at 11:09 AM on September 3, 2005

What's the point of breaking "Ruby Programming Language" into three separate links? You think I want to click each word and see what part of the site you decided to associate with it? Just one link is fine, I haven't got friggin' hours here you know.
posted by snoktruix at 11:12 AM on September 3, 2005

OK, sorry, so they're all separate links. But still, looks a bit like links for links sake. I mean, how about
"Hey I have posted something, yeah woo hoo isn't it great". Really makes one want to find out what I linked to in each of those separate individual words doesn't it.
posted by snoktruix at 11:18 AM on September 3, 2005

snoktruix - actually, I normally agree with you that it's ugly to break what you think is a single link into multiple links, but I thought all 3 of those links would be helpful for someone trying to pick up ruby (and also show that there was a previous discussion on metafilter about ruby).

Maybe what would be better in the future would be to do somethink like linking ruby programming language to the main ruby web site and then just be more explicit and say something like "(ruby previously discussed here, and more help on ruby is available here)".

The only thing I was trying to avoid by doing that was having too long of a FPP, and to dilute the message that what I'm really posting about is MouseHole.
posted by freshgroundpepper at 12:46 PM on September 3, 2005

One of the cooler things that MouseHole supports is a thing called hoodwink.d.

What hoodwink.d is, is an underground meta-comment system that allows the users to post comments about stories on other comments.

Miss the posting ability on BoingBoing that Corey took away a couple of years ago? It's back with hoodwink.d.

which you can get to by modifying your /etc/hosts file (on windows your hosts file is in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc) to have this line in it:

65.125.236.166 hoodwink.d

Then visit http://hoodwink.d and sign up for an account. This will give you access to a script file that works both in greasemonkey (the .js file) or in MouseHole (the .rb file). If you've got MouseHole installed and running as your proxy, you should just have to click on the .rb file link and it will automatically be added to MouseHole for you. Then, whenever you visit a site that has winks on it, you'll see the link next to each post so that you can add comments that other hoodwink.d peeps can see.

In fact there's actually a hoodwinked post on this metafilter post by _why (the creator of MouseHole as well as the Poignant Guide to Ruby), in it, he mentions that greasemonkey script compatibility is planned in the near future.

It's a bit underground currently, but I think that's part of the point.
posted by freshgroundpepper at 12:17 AM on September 4, 2005

Tangentally releated: Wikalong is a FireFox extension that basically adds a wiki in a small sidebar to every site. (screenshot)
posted by esch at 12:27 PM on September 4, 2005