Week 3—Reddit Userscript

Last week I sampled failure and it didn’t taste very nice. I haven’t deserted the canvas based RSS reader, honest, but I needed a break from the project, it got boring. This week I wanted to try something a bit different. Enter userscripts. For those not in the know, userscripts are user-created scripts that run in the browser to “enhance” (their words not mine) your browsing experience. I’m sure we’ve all used sites that we would like to make feel a bit less shit. For me, Reddit is one of those sites. Look at it! Bask in its all-tainting ugliness!

So about 24 hours ago I set to work trying to make it a bit more palatable. After many hours of frustration, a few eureka moments and some help from the lovely people at #forrst-chat (irc, freenode), I bring you the beginings of a Reddit userscript. I must make this abundantly clear: this isn’t finished, it’s most definitely going to have bugs in, and it may break Reddit a bit. You have been warned.

I haven’t tested this in any other browser except for chrome (where it should install as an extension and work natively). In theory it should work fine in Firefox if you have greasemonkey installed, but I can’t be sure.

Download The Reddit Userscript

A Couple of Notes:

When logged in, the navigation changes. This is because Reddit changes some of its markup depending if you’re logged in or not. I haven’t found a work around for this yet.

The source code is ugly. Really ugly.

If you want to contribute to the userscript, or just have a look at the source code, you can check it out on github.