Better HN: Take HN discussions everywhere

32 points·shmichael··8 comments

I've recently released a new version of HN Comment Embed, a greasemonkey script that embeds HN discussions into the webpage being discussed.

You simply browse to a posted page, and the HN panel pops up on the side.

This version relies on searchYC as its main source, but also parses HN's newest posts page to attain full coverage.

http://share.shmichael.com/hn_comment_embed.user.js

View on HN

Clickable http://share.shmichael.com/hn_comment_embed.user.js

I made a site with bookmarklet quite some time ago that does something similar to that.. http://www.convotrack.com (was made more for twitter though)

That's a pretty clever implementation for cross-browser, cross-community support!

Narrowing down to HN only and greasemonkey allowed me the following improvements:

* While the bookmarklet has to be actively opened by the user, HNCE pops up as a small tab whenever it is relevant.

* The comments in the bookmarklet are sorted chronologically (descending); Directly embedding the page with HNCE allows the hierarchy and ordering to be preserved.

* Another benefit of directly embedding the HN page is the ability to contribute to the conversation and up-rank the article.

Nice work! To increase adoption, I'd suggest adding a page to your site dedicated to it, with some screenshots of it in action.

Very cool. Now I wish I could get chrome on OS X to enable extensions!

Extensions are enabled in recent Chromium Mac builds: http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-ma...

However, I'm unable to get this particular user script to work in Chromium. Haven't looked at it carefully though.

It won't work in Chrome until Google implement GM-specific functions (GM_xmlhttpRequest).

very cool. thank you.

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