I love Planet PHP. Well, most things about it.
It's great for keeping on top of PHP news. I had a similar idea, seemingly right around the same time that Planet PHP went up, but I never got around to doing anything about it. I'm glad Toby and Chregu did.
Anyway, as great as the site is, it isn't without annoyances.
*** UPDATE ***: If you're a good user, you [url=http://greaseblog.blogspot.com/2005/07/mandatory-greasemonkey-update.html]upgraded greasemonkey[/url]. Unfortunately, this breaks my script (as it relies on GM_setValue and GM_getValue). Hopefully this is temporary. Carry on. ***
One of my peeves about Planet PHP is long entries hogging the screen. Learn to use your blog's "read more" feature. Anyway, it seems they've already fixed this one. The FAQ that they released today has an update:
“Update: First suggestion by Wez. Truncate too long entries. We do that now, if the entry is longer than 3500 chars, we snip it and add an additional link to the original post.”
One down. One to go.
There are certain blogs is one specific blog on Planet PHP that I really despise. It's nothing personal, it's just that the author makes very long entries (fixed!), full of images, all about a specific piece of software (well, framework), that I don't have the least care about.
I have very little patience for solutionless complaining, though, so, I did something about it.
Enter GreaseMonkey. It's a really cool extension for Mozilla (Firefox, in my case) that allows users to load site-specific javascripts that automatically run when the user loads a URL that matches the script's criteria.
Using GreaseMonkey, and some crazy Javascript (Javascript's become a really powerful language, if you've been ignoring it for the past few years, due to one-too-many popups), I was able to solve my problem. And in what I think is a really elegant way.
My script is here: http://www.phpdoc.info/greasemonkey/planetphp-selective_blogs.user.js
Follow the instructions at the GreaseMonkey site, and install/activate it.
Now, next time you go to Planet PHP, you'll see checkboxes in the blogs box (in the rightbar). Uncheck a blog, and it disappears from the listing. Re-check it, and it comes back. Not only that, but it remembers which boxes you've checked.
So, if you just can't stand reading my entries, this may be the last one you see! (-:
Chris Shiflett
2005 May 27 00:01
Awesome - thanks. :-)
Derick Rethans
2005 May 27 03:15
So I wasn't the only person who thought that ;-)
mathias
2005 May 27 04:06
did you noticed http://www.phpn.org/
grabbing php news since 2002, with over 16000 news items ..
Mid P. Gard
2005 May 27 08:29
Everyone thinks that.
Robb Irrgang
2005 May 27 10:19
I'm wondering who actually [b]does[/b] like that specific writer's pieces. personally, I couldn't care less about said framework.
Any way you can write a GreaseMonkey to strip those posts out of my Bloglines as well?
Jacques Marneweck
2005 May 27 12:31
Nope. Quite a useful greasemonkey script :)
Matthew Fonda
2005 May 29 14:23
Great! This is very cool, and very useful. Excellent work, I will have to give it a try :-)
Henri Bergius
2005 Jul 21 14:09
Guilty as charged I guess.
However, the posts are quite relevant to Midgard users, which is a part of PHP community despite what some people would like.
But anyway, cool to see that the people who are not interested can now skip my entries.
Mike Lively
2005 Jul 21 17:07
Nice work...
Poor Henri, you have a good attitude about it though :D.