Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

Marc Canter and Lucas Gonze has created a new webservice called Reblg. Lucas posted some details. In short ReBlg takes any (perma)link and sends it off to anywhere you want. When/if tools start supporting this service it can make reblogging, and more importantly, quoting much easier. Just click the button and you're good to go.

Generally speaking I'm not a fan of reblogging, because no one does is responsibly. That's not a critique of ReBlg though. ReBlg can be used for but responsible and irresponsible reblogging. I see the real value in one-click quoting and not reblogging.

After reading through the developer's notes I created two quick Greasemonkey javascripts that can insert the ReBlg buttons on any page (well, not quite). It will insert the ReBlg button after any link which contains a rel attribute with a value of either permalink or bookmark. This should include all standard Wordpress blogs.

• ReBlg button, ReBlg as intermediary
• ReBlg button, Mime helper

One script will create a button which uses the ReBlg website as intermediary, the other create a button that sends the the user the mime helper file.

Only Opera and Firefox supports these javascripts. Opera supports them out of the box, just go to Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Content > JavaScript options, and select the directory where you have saved one of the above javascripts. If you are using Firefox you need to install Greasemonkey and then install one of the two javascripts above. Then you should be able to see the buttons in action on this very page.

Just yesterday Michael Meiser told me about Greasemonkey — a plugin for Firefox that allows you to add your own custom javascripts to websites. And now today I find out (via Phil Ringnalda) that Opera will have the same feature in the upcoming version 8.0 release. Apparently the feature has been planned in Opera for years:

Actually, the User JavaScript idea predates Greasemonkey — it was more based on the way CSS works and the way you can make Opera apply your own user style sheets to all pages. The feature has been planned for years — the first implementation that actually went public was the famous Opera Bork edition that loaded a given external JS file into all MSN pages to mangle their language.

I have been dabbling a bit in javascript lately. I'm still no good at it, but I suspect that user javascript (if made easy to install) can become the next big thing. Especially since more and more websites are moving towards better structured HTML. Javascript is a lot easier to deal with when there is nice HTML to play with.

Empowering the user with the ability to control website behaviour is awesome. The first example I read about is to highlight Google search terms an any page you arrive at from Google. Another use is to make clickable blockquotes. It's a problem that no browser makes quotes like the one above clickable, but with javascript it's relatively easy to make quotes clickable. I have always been able to make my own quotes clickable (and I will do so in the near future), but with user javascripts I can make quotes on any website clickable.

For you Firefox user there is a repository of scripts for Greasemonkey available. I suspect we've only seen the top of the iceberg, and I am looking forward to playing around with this once Opera 8.0 goes final.