Feed Icon RSS 1.0 XML Feed available

Boilerplate for Using Greasemonkey with Jquery

Date: 8-Jul-2014/20:16:44-4:00

Tags: ,

Characters: (none)

Though I am all for technological empowerment, you'll often find me debating against the usage of web filtering website augmentation to "make bad sites more tolerable". I like the idea that we have a common basis on which we are seeing "what's there". It's discomforting to imagine sending someone a link that looked "perfectly fine" on your end, and then the recipient gets something entirely different... possibly offensive or malicious.
So on matters of principle, I gave up ad blockers and filtering proxies a decade ago. And I never got into installing the the scriptable "site-enhancing" scripts like Greasemonkey. However, I was asked a favor that seemed like a good fit for GreaseMonkey, so I bit the bullet and said "well, there is a tool for solving that..."
For reference, here is the simple basic boilerplate you need for a script that is going to work with jQuery. At least in the current version.
// ==UserScript==
// @name        Some String Naming Your Script
// @namespace   http://url.path.identifying.you
// @description Longer description of whatever the script is supposed to do
// @require     http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.2/jquery.min.js
// @include     http://url.patterns/script-applies-to/you-can-use.wildcards.*
// @version     1
// ==/UserScript==

try {

    $('div.whatever').each(function() {
        /*... you're on the page, whatever JavaScript should work ... */
    });

} catch (err) {

    // If an error was thrown, go ahead and present it as an alert to help
    // with debugging any problems
    alert(err.toString());
}
The big non-obvious aspect here is that @require is how you include libraries, whereas @include is how you specify patterns of URLs you expect GreaseMonkey to apply your script to. (So if you say @include http://*, it runs on every page.)
The other not-made-completely-clear bit is that the namespace is supposed to be a URL path. But once you've got those two things going, it works pretty well. The try/catch helps too.
Business Card from SXSW
Copyright (c) 2007-2018 hostilefork.com

Project names and graphic designs are All Rights Reserved, unless otherwise noted. Software codebases are governed by licenses included in their distributions. Posts on blog.hostilefork.com are licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, and may be excerpted or adapted under the terms of that license for noncommercial purposes.