Excellatronic Communications

Ive updated a few of my greasemonkey scripts for Flickr:

Flickr Shades – ( lets you change the flickr colour scheme )

Updated to work on gallery pages, also added a “?” link to every pages navigation section to make accessing the colour scheme editor easier.

FlickrPM – ( adds useful links next to usernames + enables easier flickr mailing)

Updated to work on gallery pages.

Flickr Inline Post Editor – ( Lets you edit or delete your photo comments/group/forum posts without leaving the page you are on)

Updated to work on gallery pages.

You can get the updated versions of the scripts here: http://steeev.freehostia.com/flickr/

A lot of people noticed that FB status updates posted from the new Facebook Iphone application, were getting blocked by the Facebook Purity script, so I’ve updated the script to fix this. At the same time i’ve built in functionality to make it easier to “whitelist” any other third party applications you like.

By default the script now allows the following “external” applications to post messages to your homepage: “FB Iphone app“, “Selective Twitter” and a few other useful “non spammy” apps, you can see the full list in the script if you are curious.

You can edit or add/remove applications to and from this list quite easily, you just need to know the application ID of the app you want to whitelist. You can find its ID by going to the application’s homepage, by clicking the applications icon, then looking at the URL. The applications ID is the numerical bit after “application.php?id=” e.g say i wanted to add the “Honesty Box” application to the whitelist, i would go to the “Honesty Box” application page, and look at the URL, which should look something like : “http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2552096927&ref=nf” well the ID for that application would be 2552096927

If the application page URL doesnt have an ID  in it, go to the applications Wall or Info page, that page should have the application’s ID in it. Or failing that, look for the “Block Application” link, the application ID will be definitely be embedded in that link. Another place to look for the application ID is in the “posted via someapplication” link at the bottom of the application post in your feed, if you hover your mouse over that link, it will probably display the application ID in the status bar (the bottom right hand corner of your browser)

Now to edit the script, you need to open the “Manage User Scripts” window, you can access this  via the Firefox “Tools/Greasemonkey/Manage UserScripts” menu. Select Facebook Purity in the left hand column, then click the “Edit” button, this should open the script in a text editor. Now look for the line that looks like :

var whitelist=”6628568379,115463795461,48187595837″;

this is the “whitelist” or list of applications (ids) that facebook purity will allow to display messages on the homepage. You can add or remove whatever application ids you like here, just make sure they are separated by a comma (no spaces) and the line ends in “; as above. Make your changes, and once you have finished, save the file.

Now go back to your facebook homepage and reload the page, the changes you have made should work straight away.

To edit the script in Chrome, Opera or Safari you first need to find the scripts directory on your computer, once there, just edit the script as above, and save it, and thats it.

If this script has helped you out, why not thank the author, by making a donation, big or small, anything is welcome

N.B If you are using firefox and click the edit button and a “file open” dialog box appears, it means you need to locate the text editor you wish to use, in your file system.

If you are using Windows XP or Vista, you can choose “notepad” which is located at C:\Windows\system32\NOTEPAD.exe

If you are using Windows 7, you can choose “notepad” which is located at C:\windows\syswow64\notepad.exe

If you are using Windows 2000, you can choose “notepad” which is located at C:\Winnt\system32\NOTEPAD.exe

If you are using an Apple Mac the text editor is located at /Applications/TextEdit.app

If you are using Ubuntu the text editor is located at /usr/bin/gedit
other Linux variations will most likely have a similar editor in the /usr/bin/ directory.

N.B If nothing happens when you click the edit button or if you want to change the default editor, then you need to follow these steps:
1) type about:config in the firefox address bar and press enter.
2) type greasemonkey in the filter box at the top of the page
3) right click on greasemonkey.editor and click Modify
4) now enter the path to the text editor application you want to use (see above for examples)
5) thats it, from now on, when you click edit in the manage userscripts menu, the script should open in your chosen editor.

Related Articles :

• How to edit the Facebook Purity “Extras” list
• Facebook Purity Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Guess, what… Facebook have changed their site’s code yet again, they seem to be updating their site nearly every tuesday night/wednesday morning.

I’ve update the facebook purity script to work with their changes. Re-install the script from http://www.fbpurity.com to get the script working again. If after reinstalling it still doesnt work, try clearing your browser’s cache, then reinstall the script again. If that doesn’t work, check that you havent got 2 versions of the script running at the same time, do this by going to the Tools/Greasemonkey/Manage User Scripts menu, if you have more than one copy of the script listed there, uninstall the older ones.

I’ve only tested this new version on Firefox at the moment, so could anyone with Opera, Chrome or Safari, please try it out and let me know if it works for you too.  Thanks.

Is it just a coincidence that they keep breaking facebook purity with their updates? Please have your say in the comments…

StSanders has created a masterpiece, a hilarious redub of The Rolling Stones video, Start Me Up. He’s also renamed it “Passing Stones – **** Me Up”

Watch the video here

Facebook have changed their site’s code yet again, so ive had to update the facebook purity script to work with their changes. Re-install the script from http://www.fbpurity.com to get the script working again.

Due to a code change on facebook on 29th July 2009, my facebook purity greasemonkey script stopped working, so ive updated the script once more to get it working again.

Before re-installing the script, first uninstall the old one, by going to the Firefox Tools menu then selecting Greasemonkey, then Manage Userscripts, then select Facebook Purity, then click the uninstall button. Then simply go to http://www.fbpurity.com and reinstall the script to be quiz and application spam free once more.

If you are still getting an error, try clearing the browser cache first, before reinstalling, as the browser may have cached a copy of the old version of the script.

Due to a code change on facebook, my facebook purity greasemonkey script stopped working, ive updated the script to get it working again, simply reinstall it to be quiz and application spam free once more.

Reinstall the script from here: http://www.fbpurity.com

If you are still getting an error, try clearing the browser cache first, before reinstalling, as the browser may have cached a copy of the old version of the script.

During the Christmas period Flickr enable an ‘Easter Egg’ on the site, allowing people to add Father Christmas hats and beards to photos by way of leaving a note on a photo with the text “Ho ho ho hat” for a hat, or “Ho ho ho beard” for a beard. The notes are resizable which lets you resize the image to fit the person in the picture. After the christmas period is over they switch this feature off.

I wrote a greasemonkey for firefox script that lets you re-enable the hats and beards adding/viewing functionality. Of course, the only people who will see the hats and beards will be the people with this script installed, except at Christmas, when and if Flickr re-enable the functionality across the site.

Installation Instructions

1) you need to be running firefox http://mozilla.org/firefox

2) you need to have the greasemonkey addon installed

3) install the script: flickr.ho.ho.ho.hats+beards.user.js

Usage

Once you’ve installed the script, you can check if the script is working by viewing one of the following images :

or

This script and all my other greasemonkey scripts for flickr are available here: http://steeev.freehostia.com/flickr/

Theres a new way to tag your photos to indicate flickr users are appearing in them.

Quite a few users have already started doing it. The way it works is to use the following “machine tag” notation, for each flickr user in the photo

“flickr:userid=[flickr-userid]”

(replacing [flickr-userid] with the userid of the person in the photo)
the userid is the thing that looks like 32463453@N00 and you can find out what a users userid is by right clicking on their buddy icon and checking the properties of the image. the userid is the bit between /buddyicons/ + .jpg in the image location.

e.g if i right click my buddy icon and check my buddy icon’s properties, the image location is farm1.static.flickr.com/7/buddyicons/36521957871@N01.jpg?1111947633#36521957871@N01

so my userid is the bit in bold i.e 36521957871@N01 now if i wanted to tag a photo of myself i would add the following tag flickr:userid=36521957871@N01 to the photo that i appear in. Or any even easier way to get a flickr user’s id is simply visit http://idgettr.com/

You can add as many user tags as there are people in the photo. of course, it sounds a bit complicated doing that for each user in the photo. luckily theres a much easier way!

Flickr User Tagging The Easy Way:
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1) Get firefox if you havent already from here: mozilla.org/firefox/
2) Install the greasemonkey extension for firefox addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/748
3) Install the following greasemonkey script: flickr.users.in.photos (Script updated 13th April 2009)

The script was originally created by jacobd, though i’ve enhanced the code a great deal, adding extra functionality. The script detects these user tags, when you are viewing photos on flickr, and adds user icons, usernames and links for each tagged user in the photo, next to the photo. It also makes adding users to photos a lot easier, by providing you with a “add user to photo” link next to each photo, where you have permission to add tags. Clicking the link brings up a select box, that lets you choose flickr users from your contacts list to add to the photo.

 Tip: If you click the select box once after it has loaded then start typing the first few letters of the user you want to add’s username, the select box will immediately jump to the user you wish to add, speeding up the user adding process.

When you click the add user to photo button after selecting a user, as well as a user tag being added, a note will also be added to the photo, so you can identify which user is which in the picture. The note contains their username, a link to their photostream, and also a link to more photos of them. This is kind of similar to how user tagging is done on facebook.

The script also adds a new item to each user on Flickr’s buddy menu: “View photos of this user” which when selected does a flickr search for photos of that user.

I made an RSS feed of the flickr:userid=* tags, which you can access here: feeds.feedburner.com/FlickrUsersInPhotos
It gets updated whenever anyone adds a photo with a flickr user in it.

You can also subscribe to RSS feeds for photos of individual flickr users, simply subscribe to the Flickr generated RSS feed for the flickr:userid=whateveruserid tag

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This script and all my other flickr gm scripts are available here: steeev.freehostia.com/flickr/

Flickr have started their own URL shortening service, specific to their own domain.

The service uses the http://flic.kr domain name. So far I have noticed that individual photo pages each have a short URL that look like so http://flic.kr/p/EKD8 at present you can find the short url for a photo by viewing the source code of the page it is on. it will looks something like this <link rev=”canonical” type=”text/html” href=”http://flic.kr/p/EKD8″ > its quite near the top of the page.

I wrote a quick bookmarklet, tested on Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer that lets you quickly send the shortened version of the photos URL to the twitter messaging service.

Tweet This Flickr Photo (bookmarklet)

To install, simply click and drag the above link to your bookmarks bar, or else you can right click on the link and select ‘Bookmark This Link‘ or “Add to Favourites” depending on which browser you are using. After that if you see a photo on Flickr that you would like to tweet about, you can just click the bookmarklet and the shortened URL will be sent to your Twitter status box ready for you to add a comment to go with it.

You can also shorten  Flickr user’s photostream URLs too, this is more straightforward, you just put http://flic.kr/ + the URL alias (the bit that normally comes after /photos/ in the Flickr photostream URL)  so for example, the shortcut for my photostream would be http://flic.kr/steeev

If you want to use the shortened photo URL with another service, you can use this alternative bookmarklet, which copies the shortened URL into the search box at the top right hand of the flickr page, which you can then copy and paste into the messaging service of your choice.

Short Flickr URL (bookmarklet)

Im sure the Flickr devs will be adding methods to access the short URLs via the website and also the API at some point. Until then, i think this is a useful stop gap solution.