Latest stable version 0.9 released February 15, 2009.
Latest experimental version 1.0-alpha 2 released August 15,2009.
Jump to: Introduction | Features | Download & Installation | Usage | Release History
Introduction
Assetbarista is a Greasemonkey script that adds a bit of functionality to the Achewood comic strip’s Assetbar discussion forum. It works with the Firefox web browser.
Warning: If you have found this page and are unfamiliar with Achewood, please note that it is a cartoon that occasionally features profanity. Note further that Assetbar is a discussion forum in which fans of Achewood debate the meaning and merits of each comic strip, sometimes with the aid of profanity. Assetbarista itself is unlikely to swear at you.
Assetbarista runs automatically and silently when you visit any page under the Assetbar forum for Achewood. As soon as the Assetbar page loads, Assetbarista modifies the page’s HTML to add additional functionality.
Assetbarista is open source software, released under v2.0 of the Apache License.
Features
In-reply-to link
When Assetbar discussion threads grow long, it sometimes is difficult to tell what previous comment each reply references. To make this easier, Assetbarista adds a link to the left of each comment that, when clicked, takes you to the comment to which it was a response. Here is an example:
The comment at the bottom, with the “^” to the left of it, is a reply to something much further up the page. Clicking the “^” will scroll to the parent comment.
Note that Assetbarista does not add a “^” link to every comment. It skips top-level comments, as well as the first reply to each comment. (In the latter case, it’s obvious what the parent comment is, so Assetbarista omits the “^” to keep from cluttering the page too much.)
Annotation of unread comments
Assetbar highlights in yellow any comments that you have not read yet. For a lengthy discussion thread, however, scrolling to find the highlighted comments is time-consuming and error-prone. To make the finding of unread comments easier, Assetbarista adds the text “[unread]” to the end of each unread comment. You can use Firefox’s search-in-page feature (Control-F on Windows or Linux, or Command-F on Mac) to find the unread comments quickly.
Workaround for the Firefox 3 user status popover bug
To the left of each comment on Assetbar is an avatar icon of the user who posted it. When you mouse over this icon, Assetbar pops up a little window containing some status information about the user. Under Firefox 3.x, however, you often get multiple copies of this window, most of which do not go away when you move the mouse cursor off of the icon.
The problem appears to be due to a race condition in Asetbar’s JavaScript code. Assetbarista attempts to work around this problem by suppressing the mouseMove callback on the icon. This is a somewhat inelegant hack, but it seems to work.
Unicode escaping fix
At present (Q1 2009), Assetbar incorrectly escapes characters outside the traditional ASCII range. These characters appear as “%uABCD,” where ABCD is the Unicode code point in hexadecimal. Assetbarista reencodes the affected characters as escaped HTML for proper display in the browser.
There is one significant limitation to the Unicode cleanup feature: accented characters from Western European languages display in Assetbar as the Unicode “unknown character” symbol–typically a question mark within a diamond, depending on one’s fonts. By the time Assetbarista gets access to the text within the page, the original characters are gone, so Assetbarista can’t fix them. Specifically, this happens to non-ASCII characters that are in the intersection between ISO-8859-1 and Unicode. Assetbar sends out ISO-8859-1 encoded text but declares the content-encoding to be UTF-8, so the browser gets confused and replaces the overlapping characters with U+FFFD.
Image width fix
Assetbar sets a 500-pixel width for images within posts, but the images are contained within divs that are only 400 pixels wide. Thus, for images much wider than 400px, the right side of the image is not visible. Worse yet, if the width of an image is larger than 400px but smaller than 500px, Firefox does not attempt to provide a horizontal scrollbar for it. Assetbarista fixes this so that any image wider than 400px gets a proper horizontal scrollbar.
Download & Installation
If you don’t have Greasemonkey already installed, go here to download and install it first.
Click to install the latest stable release of Assetbarista: assetbarista-0.9.user.js
Or, to install the latest in-development release with comment previewing: assetbarista-1.0alpha2
Greasemonkey will pop up an installation dialog; clicking the “install” button on that dialog will install Assetbarista. You also can use the “show script source” button to first study the Assetbarista code and confirm that it isn’t doing anything undesirable.
To disable or remove Assetbarista, go to the Firefox menu Tools->Greasemonkey->Manage User Scripts
Usage
Once installed, Assetbarista will activate automatically every time you visit a page in the Achewood forums on Assetbar.
Release History
[download]
