2005-11-11

Greasemonkey ImageShack this! scripts

Last night I made a Greasemonkey tool for making posting images to ImageShack for safe-keeping or external hosting more comfortable. Actually, I mage two; one that uploads inlined images and one that uploads linked images (if the link is also an image -- typically a thumbnail).

Functionally, it works rather well -- install the script (or scripts -- you can run both at the same time, if you like), and from then on until you turn the script off again (click the Greasemonkey icon and uncheck the appropriate script), the images on all new pages loaded will behave slightly differently when clicked. Assuming you chose the inline saver script for instance, and load this page. Everything seems normal. (In itself a bit of a misfeature, which ought to be addressed somehow usability wise.) But if, say, you click the Japanese flag, which usually (okay, I added that bit last night as well, but you get the idea) would have asked Google translate to hand you a machine translated page in Japanese. Now that flag starts flashing, while ImageShack picks it up and stores it on their hard disks. When done, you get a little popup with the resulting URL to copy and store away elsewhere, and then the image will stop flashing and turn ghosted (clicking this image will now perform its usual function again).

What I kind of miss here though, is a way of switching the script back and forth between active and inactive mode, without the fuss of using the Greasemonkey icon and reloading the page afterward. It ought to be resident at all times without doing anything, until I gave some magic command -- an odd keybinding, or perhaps a bookmarklet to trig it into action. Not quite sure what would be best yet. The popup also has to go. What would be a good way of showing the URL? Adding an input field just below the image?

Some visual cues about images being armed to be ImageShacked would also be in order. I just don't feel like interaction design at the moment, so I'm leaving this script in this somewhat sorry state, for the time being. Useful but somewhat bothersome. Feel free to keep playing with the code.

6 comments:

  1. Aren't you going to put them on userscripts?
    I had these excellent scripts and I wanted to install them again. I searched at userscripts and couldn't find them... until I finally I googled.

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  2. Feel free to, if you like. I assume that any user script that has a few years on its neck (even if I wrote it myself) will have rotted and broken, unless it has been maintained and in frequent use since then.

    I am decent at cranking out code, but not very passionate about marketing and spreading the results. But you're invited to adopt and share any hacks you like, especially if they are still useful -- at userscripts.org, or elsewhere.

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  3. Thanks, that's cool - they still work now. But I'll just stay to mentioning them in forums, caus I won't be able to update them if they break.

    BTW, would know how to make a 'user search' script, or any better search for imageshack? Search is so poor there...

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  4. Excellent script, just what i needed, But I have a problem after upload it opens the imageshack page on the same window, is there any way i could make it to open it in new tab like some changes in the code, please reply, thanks

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  5. Possibly fixable, though I am afraid I won't look into it myself. I don't think that happened back when the script was written (i e it was supposed to just pop up a prompt at the same page with the image url, without going anywhere) -- so they probably changed something on their site. (I could be wrong about that too, though.)

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  6. Thanks for replying, I don't know anything about coding so i have to wait if anyone can fix it, also the thumbnails of uploaded images have the size/resolution bar, if you could tell me anyway to turn it off by default, thanks

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Limited HTML (such as <b>, <i>, <a>) is supported. (All comments are moderated by me amd rel=nofollow gets added to links -- to deter and weed out monetized spam.)

I would prefer not to have to do this as much as you do. Comments straying too far off the post topic often lost due to attention dilution.

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