Skip to main content

Writing your first UserScript, Template as a beginner's tutorial

UserScripts are fun, useful and often productive. A lot of sites have small improvements you think could add a lot of value. And just because you are not the author of the site, you need not give up. With some basic javascript skills, you could write a userscript, install it on your browser, and make the site behave.

Step 1. Build a script from the template

Start with the following template and modify what you want
// ==UserScript==
//
//Displayable Name of your script 
// @name           My First Script 
//
// brief description
// @description    Alerts Hello   
//
//URI (preferably your own site, so browser can avert naming collisions
// @namespace      http://www.sarathonline.com/dyn/userscripts/hello/
//
// Your name, userscript userid link (optional)   
// @author         sarathonline (http://userscripts.org/users/****) 
//
// If you want to license out
// @license        GNU GPL v3 (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html) 
//
//(optional) may be used by browsers to display an about link
// @homepage       http://www.sarathonline.com/dyn/userscripts/hello/ 
//
//Version Number
// @version        1.0
//
// Urls process this user script on
// @include        http://*
//
// Add any library dependencies here, so they are loaded before your script is loaded.
//
// @require        https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.0/jquery.min.js
//
// @history        1.0 first version
// @history        1.0b first beta version, who knew!!
//
// ==/UserScript==


//And of course your code!!
$(function(){
window.alert("Hello.. My Extension processed you..");
});

Thats it, You have your first userscript. By convention user scripts are

Step 2. Host your UserScript on web.

You have by now authored yourscript.user.js file. Now you need to distribute this as an extension. To do that you need to find a home for this file on the web. If can host a js file, on your own website. You could. However, if you do that on www.userscripts.org, your script is instantly available to a much larger audience. userscripts.org is a free user script hosting site, that also doubles as a market place. userscripts.org also provides an easier way to edit the code online, in case you need to update.

Step 3. Share and Install (coming)

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Powered By

As it goes, We ought to give thanks to people who power us. This page will be updated, like the version page , to show all the tools, and people this site is Powered By! Ubuntu GIMP Firebug Blogger Google [AppEngine, Ajax and other Apis] AddtoAny Project Fondue jQuery
Read More >>

How to Make a Local (Offline) Repository in Ubuntu / Debian

If you are in a place where you dont have internet (or have a bad one) You want to download .deb packages and install them offline. Each deb file is packaged as a seperate unit but may contain dependencies (recursively). apt-get automagically solves all the dependencies and installs all that are necessary. Manually install deb files one by one resolving each dependency would be tedious. A better approach is to make your own local repository. Before you actually make a repo, You need *all* deb files. You dont practically have to mirror all of the packages from the internet, but enough to resolve all dependencies. Also, You have to make sure, you are getting debs of the correct architecture of your system (i386 etc) # 1. make a dir accessible (atleast by root) sudo mkdir /var/my-local-repo # 2. copy all the deb files to this directory. # 3. make the directory as a sudo dpkg-scanpackages /var/my-local-repo /dev/null > \ /var/my-local-repo/Packages # 4. add the local repo to sour...
Read More >>

javascript maxlength for textarea with \r\n breaks in java (esp Firefox)

Textareas allow new lines to enter. These are represented by \n (1) or \r\n (2) characters. But when you save to DB you have a limit to certain length of chars. There is no maxlength attribute in HTML that will stop you from entering data. This is generally acomplished by Javascript. You do a onkeyup hook and stop event or trim after textarea.value.length > maxlength. There are many other solutions out there.. But.. Here is the problem that most of those solutions overlook, How do you deal with the count on \n and \r\n representations. Lets first see how it matters. If the text entered has new lines, the length is calculated differently in Firefox and IE. When you enter a Text like 01234 567890 You expect the textarea.value.length to be 11. (10 chars + new line).On the backend, however, java would recieve it as 12 chars (10 chars + \r\n) (this is irrespective of FF or IE). So you are effectively saving 12 chars to DB. Worse yet, IE seems to figure textarea.value.length as 12 (...
Read More >>