Gravatar in Gmail (Update)
Posted by jon on Jan 25, 2010
A while back I wrote a Greasemonkey script to add Gravatars to Gmail. Unfortunately it broke after an update from Gmail and had a few issues I didn’t like.
I recently had a chance to go back through the script though and update it. It now uses jQuery, works with the current Gmail structure, and loads Gravatars for all open messages (the last one didn’t). It’s not perfect though. It will not yet load Gravatars if you click to open a collapsed message in a conversation (only the expanded messages upon first opening will have the Gravatar images loaded). It works pretty well otherwise, though, and it’s nice to see faces with my emails again.
I’ve got a screen shot below if you want to see what it looks like. If you’d like to get the script for yourself, I’ve posted it here. Just install Greasemonkey, click the link, and choose “install” when the popup comes up. Enjoy.
Gravatar in Gmail
Posted by jon on Mar 14, 2009
UPDATE: I’ve posted a new version of this script here. The version on this page no longer works.
Earlier today I hacked together another GreaseMonkey script. This one adds a Gravatar of the person the email was from to Gmail when reading an individual message. It’s inspired by the Thunderbird integration I read about here a while back. Here’s a screenshot of it for a better understanding of what it does:
It’s really just a prototype honestly, but it was far enough along to make me happy for now. A couple of limitations I’d like to correct some day (if I ever get around to it) would be to modify it to work with multiple open messages and to only display the image if the email address actually has a gravatar (currently it just displays the default gravatar image in this case). It would also be nice to clean up how the image is added to the email – currently it’s a long dom navigation. I’ve posted the script here if anyone is interested in giving it a try (or updating it). Also, if you didn’t already know about it (because I didn’t) the Gmail team has built a nice little API for people developing GreaseMonkey scripts.
As always, feedback welcome.
Twitter Throttle
Posted by jon on Mar 7, 2009
One of my biggest pet peeves on Twitter is when people I follow slam Twitter with a bunch of tweets in a short time. Maybe I’m the only one, but it’s definitely the #1 reason I stop following people. I don’t want a single user completely taking over my Twitter page…
With this in mind, I decided to write a GreaseMonkey script today to address the problem. I call it Twitter Throttle, and what it does is hides (and groups if they’re in a row) tweets when a user has more than one tweet on my screen at the same time. It will then also add however many older tweets are needed to have the correct total viewable on the page. So, for example, if there are 5 tweets that are hidden (because the user that made the tweet has already made a tweet that is currently being displayed) then it will pull in the 5 previous tweets that are by users not yet represented on your page. This effectively ensures that if there are 20 items on the page there will be at least 20 different users on the page as well. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like in use:
Clicking on the links will display the tweets in case you still want to read them. I’ve posted the script here if anyone is interested. Be sure to set your twitter username and password in the script (used in the API call to add in older tweets to fill in for the hidden ones). Let me know if you have any feedback.