[ANN] The MouseHole Proxy 1.0 -- a Greasemonkey alternative

[why the lucky stiff]

And now I ask these gaunt faces, "Is anyone in the mood for fledling
software, a few hours old?"

[*] the MouseHole proxy [*] 1.0 [*] with complimentary hoodwink.d free
pass [*]

= Background =
Lately, on RedHanded, we've been trying out an experiment with a
Greasemonkey script and a Ruby script. What we're doing is cladestine
off-web experimentation and it is of the utmost importance that we
remain concealed and uncatalogued by the major search engines.

Now we've challenged ourselves to replace Greasemonkey with a proxy
composed of Ruby.

= The Workings =
How does this proxy work? Well, THAT I can tell you.

* The proxy has a directory named `userScripts' which contains a bunch
of files with a .user.rb extension.
* You start up the proxy on your machine.
* Setup the proxy in the connection settings in your browser.
* As you surf, the proxy will rewrite the web, based on the scripts you
have in your `userScripts' directory.

The proxy is currently quite slow. And the HTML gets pretty munged
sometimes. And there is no caching.

But it's definitely cross-browser. And uses REXML for XPath support,
open-uri as a replacement for XMLHttpRequest, and JSON reading and printing.

= Crawling into the Hole =
A few MouseHole links:

* Project page: <http://rubyforge.org/projects/mousehole>
* Downloads: <http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=895>
* Announcement: <http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/theMouseholeProxy.html>

Over the next few days, we'll feature some basic user scripts on
RedHanded, so you can get the hang of scripting this thing.

_why

 

[Phil Tomson]

And now I ask these gaunt faces, "Is anyone in the mood for fledling
software, a few hours old?"

[*] the MouseHole proxy [*] 1.0 [*] with complimentary hoodwink.d free
pass [*]

= Background =
Lately, on RedHanded, we've been trying out an experiment with a
Greasemonkey script and a Ruby script. What we're doing is cladestine
off-web experimentation and it is of the utmost importance that we
remain concealed and uncatalogued by the major search engines.

Now we've challenged ourselves to replace Greasemonkey with a proxy
composed of Ruby.

= The Workings =
How does this proxy work? Well, THAT I can tell you.

* The proxy has a directory named `userScripts' which contains a bunch
of files with a .user.rb extension.
* You start up the proxy on your machine.
* Setup the proxy in the connection settings in your browser.
* As you surf, the proxy will rewrite the web, based on the scripts you
have in your `userScripts' directory.

The proxy is currently quite slow. And the HTML gets pretty munged
sometimes. And there is no caching.

But it's definitely cross-browser. And uses REXML for XPath support,
open-uri as a replacement for XMLHttpRequest, and JSON reading and printing.

= Crawling into the Hole =
A few MouseHole links:

* Project page: <http://rubyforge.org/projects/mousehole>
* Downloads: <http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=895>
* Announcement: <http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/theMouseholeProxy.html>

Over the next few days, we'll feature some basic user scripts on
RedHanded, so you can get the hang of scripting this thing.

This looks like some kind of revolution starting over there at RedHanded. I
have this feeling that someone could end up winning next year's
'Hacker-of-the-year award' over all this... or perhaps a very slight
chance of banishment to Guantanamo (unlikely, but look on the bright
side, it's a tropical paradise).

Kudos and keep up the good work!

Phil