Boxes and Glue

I asked the lazyweb some time ago about hacks to get a couple of things done:

• skip the redirect on google search results (at least for cut&paste purposes)
• tinyurls less opaque

The second one was getting more and more critical as use of twitter and jaiku makes tinyurls mandatory. They even do it automatically in certain cases. Yesterday (via Brian McCallister and a colleague) I got a greasemonkey script that does the later. It is from @kosugi, and it is called detinyurl. It requires greasemonkey, and got published just two weeks after I requested it, which confirms I’m an early  adopter.

I’m modifying it to make it deuglyfy google URLs in the clipboard. Google’s javascript in the results page rewrites the clear URL every time I change it, so it is not a straightforward problem. I’ll report when I get something working. I hope I’ll be able to get a way to copy URLs from google result pages without having to edit them by hand.

I’m proceeding slowly as it is the first time I install greasemonkey and I’m not familiar with refacing DOM trees :). I never really felt the need to mess with loaded pages before: flashblock and adblock plus where enough for me.