Troy's Twitter Script

Enter Troy's Twitter script for Firefox that I reviewed in detail a few months ago.

Troy's script added the RT button to my stream (along with inline picture and video embed, auto url expander and shortener, name autocomplete, and other things) way before Twitter introduced it.

It also allowed me to add a couple of words or rephrase the retweet to make it more relevant to my followers.

Here is what clicking on the Retweet button used to do after you installed the Twitter script:

Twitter's Own Retweet

After Twitter rolled out their own Retweet, it simply took over the Retweet button that Troy's script added and everyone was happy. Right?

Wrong. Many users, including myself, were left craving the old functionality back.

The Newest Version Of Troy's Twitter Script

About an hour ago, Troy announced version 10.9 of his script which brings back the old functionality in the form of the "Comment" button. Here it is pictured below:

which yet again gives me the opportunity to edit the retweet:

Now we can have the best of both worlds – the new Comment button lets you retweet and edit while the Retweet button remains the same Twitter's own one-click Retweet.

Download Troy's Twitter Script

Again, here are the simple installation instructions to get Troy's Twitter script:

1. Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
2. Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
3. Install the Troys Twitter script

Credit

As before, all credit goes to the awesome Troy.

Tweet this post if you like it and let your friends know about this great twitter web tool.

• Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More
• StackOverflow.com, SuperUser.com, ServerFault.com Fan? Here's A Greasemonkey Script To Keep Track Of All Your Accounts
• How To Fight Clickjacking (Using The Recent Twitter Hijacking As An Example)
• The Real Reasons To Use Twitter (Get Over Your Prejudice Already)
• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 2 :: Pragmatic Extensions

If you, like me, love StackOverflow, SuperUser, ServerFault – the community programming/software/sysadmin Q&A sites built by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood and you are an active member of these sites, you owe it to yourself to install this underappreciated and unadvertised greasemonkey script: StackOverflow – User Info Aggregate. I really think it should get more attention. All credit goes to Jon Erickson.

(What? You've never heard of the sites mentioned above and you call yourself a programmer? Shame on you – go check them out immediately!)

Once you install the script, the top bar that normally shows only single site statistics, like so:

will turn into a multi-site bar, with all your stats at a glance, like so:

Each icon is hyperlinked to your account on the respective site, which makes navigating between all of them very easy.

Installation

Here are the steps required to get the script up and running:

1. Install greasemonkey for Firefox.
2. Install the StackOverflow – User Info Aggregate script.
3. Right click on the greasemonkey icon and select Manage User Scripts…
   
4. Select the script from the list and click the Edit button. This should open up your favorite editor or prompt you to select one.
   
5. Find the section with userIds and replace them with ones of your own (by default the IDs belong to the script author). You can get your own IDs from the user info page (click your name at the top of each site you have an account on).
    
6. Now save the script file and reload the page – you should have all the stats displayed in one place.

Credits

• Big thanks to the creator of this script Jon Erickson.
• Orginal Meta.StackOverflow post by Jon.

Enjoy.

• Enable A Twitter Retweet (RT) Button That Lets You Add Comments Before Retweeting
• Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More
• How To Fight Clickjacking (Using The Recent Twitter Hijacking As An Example)
• How To Make Firebug's JavaScript Debugger Break Inside Dynamic JavaScript Using The 'debugger' Keyword (IE & Chrome Too)
• How To Export/Import Your ExpanDrive/SFTPDrive Drives And Settings

StackOverflow is an amazing site for coding questions. It was created by Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware.com, Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com, and some other incredibly smart guys who truly care about user experience. I have been a total fan of SO since it went mainstream and it's now a borderline addiction (you can see my StackOverflow badge on the right sidebar).

The Story

So, one day someone at StackOverflow started a "Hidden features of" post about a famous language (I don't feel like finding out which one was first exactly), and it turned out to be so popular that other posts in the same series started popping up.

Such questions were quickly turned into community wikis, for the purposes of harvesting and organizing information coming from the best developers on the planet and voted by users of the site. There are literally hundreds of answers, sorted by votes.

Hidden Features Of

Programming Languages

Hidden features of ActionScript3 / Flex

Hidden features of ASP.NET

Hidden features of x86 assembly

Hidden features of C

Hidden features of C++

Hidden features of C#

Hidden features of ColdFusion

Hidden features of D

Hidden features of Delphi

Hidden features of Erlang

Hidden features of F#

Hidden features of Flash development, Flash language (AS2/3), and Flash IDE

Hidden features of Java

Hidden features of JavaScript

Hidden features of Haskell

Hidden features of Lisp

Hidden features of Lua

Hidden features of Objective-C

Hidden features of Perl

Hidden features of PHP

Hidden features of Python

Hidden features of R

Hidden features of Ruby

Hidden features of Ruby on Rails

Hidden features of Scala

Hidden features of Silverlight

Hidden features and Dark Corners of STL?

Hidden features of TCL/TK

Hidden features of VB.Net

Hidden features of VBA

Databases

Hidden features of MySQL

Hidden features of Oracle

Hidden features of PL/SQL

Hidden features of PostgreSQL

Hidden features of SQL Server

Mobile

Hidden features of Android development

Other

Hidden features of Bash – also see my bash cheatsheet.

Hidden features of CSS

Hidden features of Django

Hidden features of Eclipse

Hidden features of Emacs

Hidden features of Grails

Hidden features of Greasemonkey

Hidden features of HTML

Hidden features of HTTP

Hidden features of jQuery

Hidden features of mod_rewrite

Hidden features of Qt

Hidden features of RegEx

Hidden features of Spring framework

Hidden features of VHDL

Hidden features of Visual Studio (2005-2008)

Hidden features of Windows.Forms

Hidden features of WPF and XAML

Hidden features of Xpath+Xslt

I will try to maintain this list, adding new languages that join the series as I find them. Now go learn something new!

• StackOverflow.com, SuperUser.com, ServerFault.com Fan? Here's A Greasemonkey Script To Keep Track Of All Your Accounts
• Comparison Between Solr And Sphinx Search Servers (Solr Vs Sphinx – Fight!)
• Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More
• WordPress Developers – How Do You Make A Living [Poll + Discussion]?
• Delicious.com [Quietly] Rolls Out Domain And Url Searching/Filtering. Finally!

I don't know about you, but I'm incredibly sick of Facebook quizzes. Yeah, shit like this which occupies 90% of my news feed:

And to make matters worse, Facebook provides no means to block these quizzes and rid your profile of them forever. The only thing you can do is block each individual quiz. But just like weeds in your backyard, when you block one, three more rise up in its place. I know I am not alone here – there are literally billions of people searching for a solution to the plague.

So, what does the tech community do when it is not happy?

1. Runs to mommy, crying.
2. Drinks heavily, passes out, and comes to work with a keyboard faceprint, dressed as Koolaid.
3. Ignores the problem and lives with it (pussy).
4. Takes the matters into its own hands and develops a solution.

The correct answers are:

1. 2. and 4.

Enter a true geek at heart by the name of Steeev with his Facebook Purity greasemonkey script that was created with the sole purpose of BLOCKING THE FUCKING QUIZZES. Go Steeve Steeev!

Solution

Installation is as easy as 1, 2, 3:

1. Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
2. Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
3. Install the Facebook Purity script

That's it. Now go to your Facebook page (make sure you access it via www.facebook.com or www.new.facebook.com and not YOURUNIVERSITY.facebook.com (like ucdavis.facebook.com)).

Check it out – all quizzes are gone, the script even tells you how many quizzes were blocked:

Pure bliss. Rest quizless now, everyone.

• StackOverflow.com, SuperUser.com, ServerFault.com Fan? Here's A Greasemonkey Script To Keep Track Of All Your Accounts
• Enable A Twitter Retweet (RT) Button That Lets You Add Comments Before Retweeting
• Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More
• Are Your Youtube Video Embeds Missing The Full Screen Button? Here Is How To Fix It
• [Web Dev] Browser Breakdown Stats+Charts From Plaxo.com For December 2009 And Thoughts

Welcome to part 2 of the Essential Firefox Extensions And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide series. In this article I’m going to describe a number of time saving pragmatic extensions that make me a better, faster, more efficient browser user (browserer?).

Pragmatic Extensions

All-in-One Gestures

All-in-One Gestures introduces customizable gestures for all kinds of actions. To perform a gesture, hold the right (by default) button and move the mouse in the specified direction, drawing the needed shape.

I use it mostly for 3 things: history back/forward and close tab (see below). Once you start using gestures, there is no going back.

Download Statusbar

Download Statusbar is a handy extension that will show your downloads on a dedicated bar right above the status bar. It also adds a much needed “Delete from system” option to each download (why, Firefox, would you not give me an option to delete my downloads at all?). The Download Statusbar only shows up if there’s at least one download not dismissed yet. Double clicking on a finished file will both launch and remove it from the bar.

OpenDownload

Running downloaded files without saving them is probably the only Internet Explorer feature I actually missed, until I found OpenDownload that is. This extension will give you an option to launch a download upon completion in addition to just saving it. I don’t have to worry about finding and deleting it from my system later as it goes to Firefox’s temporary folder.

Tab Mix Plus

This extension is very powerful and versatile. It controls various aspects of the browser tabs, windows, session, and mouse. Here are the settings I find useful:

• open links that open in a new window in a new tab instead
• open all javascript popups in tabs (I hate popups)
• in fact, I enable the single window mode, in which all attempts to open a new window – by webpages or by you, including starting a new Firefox – will be redirected to a new tab
• highlight unread tabs, which would italicize the tab titles of pages that had something new loaded since you last opened them
• show progress meter on tabs
• close tab button on all tabs (instead of a single one on the right side)
• hide the new tab button that occupies extra space
• customize the tab menu options

Here are some option screens:

Google Toolbar

The google toolbar is historically sort of a must for me. It adds a couple of nice features on top of the default search box and frees the latter, so that I can set it to another search engine (IMDB in my case). With the amount of searching one does on google daily, the sheer number of clicks and keystrokes saved will be in the thousands. Daily. I search a lot, OK?

In addition to providing an always present search bar, the toolbar carries a number of useful features, such as live search suggest, instant PageRank (unneeded if you install SEO Toolbar or SearchStatus), search Gmail and News buttons (and many others), clickable search terms good for in-page search, highlighting of the said terms, a simple autofill (though I use an irreplaceable AI Roboform instead), spell check (Firefox has one built-in now), translate (I use the gTranslate extension instead). All in all, one can do without google toolbar, depending on the needed functionality.

Linkification

Linkification is a really pragmatic extension. It hyperlinks any url-looking strings that aren’t already hyperlinked. Take a look.

Linkification off:

Linkification on:

The extension has a variety of options to satisfy even savvy users but I found that defaults work really well. If for some reason you want to momentarily turn off linkification, just tap the button in the tray and the page will revert to its original form. By the way, if you really want to put it to the test, install it and head over to the comprehensive test case list.

Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey is the most versatile extension available for Firefox, as it’s essentially a whole framework for scripts that can manipulate any aspect of any page. Head over to userscripts.org and take a look at the myriads of scripts written and submitted by other Greasemonkey users.

Still not clear what these can do? Let me list some that I use and their brief functionality:

• Digg Top 10 Direct – automatically rewrites the digg’s top 10 links to go straight to the articles, instead of the digg comment page. Clicking on the digg icon still goes to the comments page though, and I think this is the ideal functionality.
• Google Image Relinker – rewrites google image search urls to go directly to the corresponding images rather than the page they were found on.
• YousableTubeFix – adds a small smart menu that dynamically shows which qualities a given youtube video is available in and automatically picks the best one, adds download links to the each quality (FLV and MP4), resizes the player to your liking, and a few other things. It is also quite customizable.

• The now world famous Troy's Twitter Script that I reviewed a few week ago – it does everything Twitter currently doesn't, including Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, and more.
• AideRSS Google Reader Integration – adds AideRSS feed rank to each entry in Google Reader, which allows eyeballing more important articles within a few seconds of seeing a feed. Also available as a separate extension for those not using Greasemonkey.

Show MyIP

Show MyIP does exactly what it says: it displays your current IP. What I like about it is that it queries for it on demand, after you left or right click the icon. This approach avoids unnecessary queries going around.

-> ->

What I don’t like about it is that there seems to be no way to copy this IP to clipboard. Ideally, a right click option would work great (that’s the way the next extension ShowIP does it). I left a comment about this fact on the extension’s page, so hopefully the author will implement it shortly.

Also, if an error occurs, be prepared for some good old German cursing:

ShowIP

ShowIP, in contrast to Show MyIP, actually displays the IP(s) of the website I’m currently on. It then allows me to copy it (or all of them) into clipboard and provides quick information links, such as whois, ip2country, and traceroute.

ShowIP is useful for both developers who want to know which dev server they’re currently working on as well as regular users who are interested in the location or whois of a site they’re visiting.

iimmgg.com Tools

iimmgg.com is a picture hosting site similar to tinypic.com and photobucket.com. Generally, it allows quick picture uploading with thumbnail creation. This extension makes this process insanely simple, I can’t say enough praise how good my user experience was with this extension. Check this out.

The extension has 2 modes:

1. If you right click on a picture, there’s a single option to upload it to iimmgg.com:

As soon as you click Upload, you are almost immediately redirected to a page on iimmgg.com with your picture and thumbnails already generated. Swoosh, that was fast. Internally, the extension sends the user to something like http://www.iimmgg.com/upload.php?u=http%3A//beerpla.net/wp-content/uploads/BenefitsofMUNI_1E7D/image.png&r=about:blank&s=1&t=, which then redirects to the final picture.

2. If you right click anywhere else on the page, there are now 3 ways to capture an image to iimmgg.com:

Select either of the 3 options: Visible Page, Full Page, or Select Area. Let’s say I select Select Area. A resizable overlay that I can drag it around to select the area I want shows up. Brilliant.

After I figure out what I want to capture, I click on the Capture Selected Area button in a bar that just showed up (btw, the styling of both the bar and the selector are very reminiscent of the Web Developer extension):

The next and final prompt shows up with the Image Format selection (PNG – High Quality, JPEG – High Quality, JPEG – Medium Quality, and JPEG – Low Quality), SFW selection, and capture name:

Click Capture and upload (or save to disk, which is not as fun but also useful):

Voila – the picture is ready for sharing.

Remove Cookie(s) for Site

Remove Cookie(s) for Site does exactly what it says – removes all cookies that belong to a domain and all subdomains of the site you’re currently on. Right click anywhere on the page, click Remove Cookie(s) for Site and the taskbar will update with the number of cookies removed.

->

You can also pull out a nice little button to a location of your choosing, like so:

Oftentimes I don’t even bother looking for a logout button – deleting all cookies is a lot faster.

Signature

Signature, as you probably guessed, inserts a signature into a text form. It supports as many signatures as you want. The uses can be versatile, here are just some:

• the obvious “first and last name” signature
• a full signature with your site link which can help in site promotion. Mine, for example, is
  Artem
  http://beerpla.net
  http://twitter.com/ArtemR
• disclaimers
• coined replies to emails
• various addresses
• repetitive urls
• any other frequently used set of strings that you have to continuously copy-paste

QuickRestart

QuickRestart adds a Restart Firefox option to the File menu. This is quite handy, especially when you have a lot of extensions and it may take Firefox 30 seconds to shut down.

The only downside of this is that it seems to lose the protected and locked tab properties set by Tab Mix Plus. Shutting down Firefox and starting it manually does not lose such properties. This is no longer a problem in the latest Tab Mix Plus version.

Resizeable Textarea

Ever seen a comment box this big and got annoyed by the idiot who designed it?

Fear not, as Resizeable Textarea adds resize capabilities to any text area. Move the cursor to the bottom or right borders, or the bottom-right corner, and drag all you want:

TryAgain

TryAgain is a great and very simple extension. It retries loading a failed page up to 5 times instead of just sitting there. This screenshot explains everything:

View Cookies

View Cookies is a simple extension that adds a Cookies tab to the VIew Page Info box. The tab allows viewing, removing, and copying cookie info for the site you’re currently visiting. There is a number of extensions that do similar things, like Firebug and Remove Cookie(s) for Site, but I install View Cookies anyway because its functionality makes sense.

Google Gears

Google Gears is a very useful extension, and it’s a shame that a lot of people don’t seem to understand what it does. Think of it as simply a secure local cache (developed by Google). Quite a few popular websites support Gears, and I think it is best to just give a few examples of actual usage.

• gmail.com – gmail rolled out offline email support quite recently, which is the most useful implementation of Gears to date.
• wordpress – if you host a wordpress blog, you can opt in to cache a few hundred files in Gears that will speed up the wordpress admin interface. WordPress calls this Turbo mode.
• rememberthemilk.com – RTM, the most advanced and functional TODO list site, offers an excellent implementation of Gears. If you lose your connection, you are free to create, modify, and delete any tasks you want – all the changes will be synchronized when you go back online.
• google reader – the reader can download feed items for offline viewing but the implementation is not very good – you have to explicitly go offline by clicking a button, at which point Gears will download 2000 items.

Installing Gears on its own will technically not do anything for you. You will need to enable support for each site individually. For example, Offline gmail is available from the gmail Labs by clicking on in the top right corner.

From a technical standpoint, Gears uses a local SQLite database for storage. The Gears security model is described here.

gTranslate

GTranslate translates selected text into a language of your choice. It can be set to autodetect the source language or forced to a specific one. I must say so far it worked very well and detected the source language automatically without flaw.

Once the translation is received, gTranslate shows it and links to the google translate page:

Additionally, if the selected text is in an editable field, gTranslate will offer an option to replace the selection with its translation:

SearchStatus

SearchStatus is a useful and relatively simple SEO extension. It shows a quick roundup of page rankings for the current page from Google (PageRank), Alexa, and Compete. This lets me quickly check how popular [or lame] the site I’m on is and keep tabs on my own online properties. Right clicking each metric grants access to a few useful shortcuts and for the lazy pragmatic, right clicking the little symbol has such links as Show Whois, Show robots.txt, Show sitemap.xml, and others.

Another not so obvious but useful feature of this extension is the ability to mark rel=’nofollow’ links. You rightfully obsessed SEO junkies can quickly see which parts of your site leak the valuable link juice and which ones don’t. Take a look at these nofollow links that SearchStatus marked with light red background:

SEO Toolbar

This toolbar is probably going to be useful for relatively hardcore SEO fiends as most people would do just fine with the above SearchStatus extension. The toolbar seems a bit bulky and slow but has a ton of SEO related functionality. It is, of course, free. It shows Google PageRank, Yahoo linkdomain, Yahoo page links, DMOZ directory, Yahoo directory, Best of the web directory, Archive.org, Compete uniques, and SEMRush traffic value:

It also links to a bunch of tools, like quantcast analysis, google trends, and alexa:

For a quick, more in-depth, exportable overview, press the info button :

However, the 2 most useful to me features are probably the Rank Checker :

and Compare Sites :

End of Part 2

This marks the end of part 2 in the series. I expect this page to update pretty often, whenever I find new extensions, so bookmark it using your favorite method by clicking the button below.

The next part in the series (available soon) will describe a number of useful web development extensions.

• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 1 :: Tips
• Skype Extension For Firefox Is A Piece Of Crap – Leaks Memory, Hangs Firefox, Clubs Baby Seals
• Firefox Being Slow, Especially Switching Tabs, High CPU Load, Memory Problems? Are You Using Firecookie For Firebug?
• How To Fight Clickjacking (Using The Recent Twitter Hijacking As An Example)
• Thoughts on Google Chrome

You could only dream about such twitter improvements… that is until you use the Troys Twitter script. Just perform the following steps and you will have the features I describe in this article. Here we go:

1. Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
2. Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
3. Install the Troys Twitter script

Once you are done with the above steps, head over to twitter.com (there’s no need to restart Firefox). You will then be able to enjoy the following enhancements, which I ordered here in terms of usefulness to me:

Autocomplete

Do you have a few friends with names so complicated, you can’t type them out by hand? Troys script autocompletes your friends’ names – just type @ and a few letters of their name. This is my favorite feature.

Before:

After:

Search Bar And Favorite Searches Saved

A search box is added to the sidebar. You can make a number of favorite searches, which then also remain sticky on the sidebar above the search box. When you click on a search term, the current page is updated without reloading the whole thing. Note that the favorite search terms are saved locally in your browser and won’t show up on your other computers.

Before:

After:

Auto Expander Of Shortened URLs

Automatically expands url shorteners, so instead of seeing a load of tinyurls and bit.lys, you see proper urls and their native page titles (neat!).

Before:

After:

Auto URL Shortener

Updated: The URL shortener auto shortens urls as you type them but only if they will overflow the 140 character limit, otherwise they stay as they are (it now works flawlessly).

Before:

After:

Auto Pagination

As you reach the bottom of the page, more earlier updates are automatically loaded after a few seconds. This means you don’t need to click or leave the page in order to see earlier updates. It could get a bit annoying, so I requested an ability to turn off certain script features. Update: you can now turn off every feature of the script individually.

Auto Media Embed Expander

Pictures and videos are automatically embedded.

Before:

(Uhmm, I don’t know why I highlighted “sack” but I don’t feel like retaking the screenshot… Yeah…)

After:

Retweet (RT) Button

Adds the missing RT button to each update.

Before:

After:

Autopopulate Bios on User Listings

Updated: This function will save you hundreds of clicks – when viewing someone's followers, rather than just seeing their names, the script adds their bios.

Before:

After:

Hyperlinked Hash Tags

Hash tags are now hyperlinked to the twitter search page. Seriously, twitter can’t do that by default?

Before:

After:

User’s Local Time

The script adds a user’s local time. See the example below using the profile of a lovely Kamikazekitty. This feature seems unpublished and I found it by accident.

Before:

After:

Nested Replies

This is a great feature – it gives context to @ replies. For example, @ev’s reply to kevin is boring and out of context until you see what they’re talking about, all without looking up @kevin’s updates.

Before:

After:

Mutual Friends Marked

Updated: This is a new feature. People who you follow and who also follow you back (mutual friendship) are marked with a little smiley face.

Before:

After:

Auto @fxxxmylife Expansion

Updated: Woot! Following the infamous @fxxxmylife is no longer annoying: all posts get auto-expanded. Brilliant. For those who don't know, FML is a site collecting short stories that all start with "Today," and end with "FML". Here are the top FMLs to get you started [hooked].

Before:

After:

That’s it for now in the current script version (6.5) but what a world of difference, isn’t it? Tweet this post if you like it and let your friends know about this great twitter web tool.

• Enable A Twitter Retweet (RT) Button That Lets You Add Comments Before Retweeting
• StackOverflow.com, SuperUser.com, ServerFault.com Fan? Here's A Greasemonkey Script To Keep Track Of All Your Accounts
• How To Fight Clickjacking (Using The Recent Twitter Hijacking As An Example)
• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 2 :: Pragmatic Extensions
• The Real Reasons To Use Twitter (Get Over Your Prejudice Already)