Great News.YC Greasemonkey Script | Hacker News Reader

Great News.YC Greasemonkey Script

userscripts.org

14 pointsjoeguilmette17 comments

Wow, I'm surprised to see someone dug this up.

A lot has chanced since I hacked this script together and I'd expect that most features are now broken -- take that as a warning!

I think I spend too much time reading social news; honestly, I misread that as "dugg this up"

That's not that bad. Considerably worse are the people who think dig is actually spelled with two g's.

Don't feel too bad. I did the same thing :(

Ed, you da man! I just loaded it up and it looks amazing! Amazing what Greasemonkey and an awesome hacker can do! Thank you again!

And you know, I kind of miss the colors and design from the original YC news. This makes it have a white background. Who knows, maybe I'll get used to it.

I think PG should look at this design, I prefer it to the normal one any day.

The main reason it looks better is the white background, which I've been thinking of switching to. Otherwise it's a net lose. That productish look wastes a lot of space at the top of the screen. The current page looks the way it does partly because it works better on small screened mobile devices, which is an important factor for a news site.

Speaking of mobile devices, the current tiny arrows don't work well at all on a mobile device, especially on the iPhone (since there is no stylus). I have to zoom way in to make sure that I press the right one.

Yeah, I noticed that too. I'll fix that.

i actually dont really even like the color/button changes that much at all.

what i do like is having the threads and the news side by side.

Sounds like you should consider selective style sheets for mobile devices. That way you can accommodate small displays and not at the expense of regular users.

While the white background helps, I tried to pay a bit of attention to type size and color contrast as well. The result of this effort is that you immediately know what's important, vs. what's not.

Two other things to consider:

1) Utility pane on the right, which I consider to be a big usability win (thread comments when you want them; your own comments when not on a thread)

2) A visual distinction for discussion threads vs. link threads

how does the right hand pane work? I can see my user threads, but I cant get it to display an articles comments.

Yep, that's one of the broken features I mentioned below. The whole script is admittedly over-reliant on YC's markup when finding DOM elements.

When I wrote it, the script was nothing more than a dirty hack. I'm beginning to think it might be time for a revisit. (Considering I'm already distracted by the Sox ALCS win...)

There's no search on most pages, and I get this error (not sure if it's related):

filter((function (a) {return a.href.indexOf("comments?id=") >= 0;}), articleReferences[i].parentNode.parentNode.nextSibling.getElementsByTagName("a"))[0] has no properties file:///home/.../components/greasemonkey.js Line 556

BTW I'm on Firefox 1.5.

In the spirit of 'do one thing and do it well': http://akkartik.name/newsyc-9108.user.js

All it does is add the 2-pane interface, so clicking on a comment link shows comments on the right pane.

Color scheme repels. Going back.

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