Category Archives: JURN tips and tricks

How to import/export a list of banned URLs from the Google Noise Reduction script, for Firefox + GreaseMonkey.

20 Saturday Nov 2010

Posted by in How to improve academic search, JURN tips and tricks, JURN's Google watch

≈ 2 Comments

You may have spent some time building up a list of banned URLs for the Firefox addon Surfclarity, which strips unwanted domains from Google Search Results. Surfclarity no longer works with the latest Google changes, but the Greasemonkey script Google Noise Reduction does. In this tutorial we’ll swop the Surfclarity blacklist into the Google Noise Reduction blacklist.

1. In Firefox’s address bar, type: about:config.

2. Scroll down to extensions.surfclarity.patterns

Double click on the line of banned URLs you’ll find there, and copy them to Notepad.

3. Scroll further down to greasemonkey.scriptvals.http://exego.net//Google Noise Reduction.blacklist and take a look at the format. Note that it’s a little different than Surfclarity…

({‘britannia.com’:true, ‘oxfordjournals.org’:true, ‘tandf.co.uk’:true, ‘ingentaconnect.com’:true, ‘sagepub.com’:true, ‘myspace.com’:true, ‘experts-exchange.com’:true})

So we’re going to have to do some basic search-and-replace on our Surfclarity blacklist. Back up the Google Noise Reduction.blacklist if you want, as we’re going to overwrite it in a few moments.

4. Go back to Notepad and look at the list of Surfclarity URLs you just copied out.

Search for : and replace with : ‘ — note the space after the “:”.

Then search for : and replace it with ‘:true,

Now add ({‘ to the very start of this list, and ‘:true}) to the very end of this list.

Congratulations, you now have your SurfClarity list in Google Noise Reduction format.

5. Copy your new list to the clipboard, go back to greasemonkey.scriptvals.http://exego.net//Google Noise Reduction.blacklist, clear what’s in there at the moment, and then paste the new list in. You’re done.

Obviously, you can now also copy a backup of the Google Noise Reduction.blacklist

Anthologize for WordPress – ebook-maker plugin

07 Tuesday Sep 2010

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks

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Anthologize turns your WordPress blog into a platform for the production of an ebook. Funded by the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities. Output formats include…

“PDF, ePub, and TEI, an open XML format for storage and exchange.”

It’s a 0.4 alpha, but seems very promising. If you want to use it with a WordPress.com account, you’ll need to export all your content, then reimport all your content into a self-hosted WordPress install.

Disable Google autocomplete, May 2010

27 Thursday May 2010

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, JURN's Google watch

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Uh oh, the horrible Google “Autocomplete” function is back (aka: dumb flickery search-suggestions which appear as you type in a search query). The proven option of blocking it by adding clients1.google.com to the list of blocked sites in Firefox’s AdBlock Plus no longer works.

Instead, I killed it by installing the new DisableAutocomplete script for Firefox’s GreaseMonkey addon. Once installed, you need to right-click on the little Monkey icon in the bottom-right of your browser window, and go to Manage User Scripts | DisableAutocomplete | … and then add in whatever the exact URL of your Google search homepage is.

There is one unfortunate side-effect, which affects those wanting to use the drop-down Google sidebar on the left of the screen. It won’t unfold when you click on it. Those who need to access the left-hand drop-down sidebar in search results should also add Google Remove Junk alongside DisableAutocomplete.

For those maintaining Google CSEs: Your site URLs list will refuse to load while DisableAutocomplete is running. Simply turn it off temporarily, while you add or delete site URLs to your Google CSE.

UPDATE, Nov 2010: Set your browser’s Google homepage URL to: http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0&hl=en This will disable autocomplete without scripts or add-ons.

SurfClarity export/import – how to do it

19 Monday Apr 2010

Posted by in How to improve academic search, JURN tips and tricks, JURN's Google watch

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How to export your personal SurfClarity list of websites (sites you’ve banned from appearing in Google search results). In the Firefox address bar type:

about:config

Scroll down to the line for: extensions.surfclarity.patterns   Look along the line and you find the list of URLs you have entered in SurfClarity. They can be copied out as plain text. You can also modify them.

Readability

31 Thursday Dec 2009

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, My general observations

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Readability is an interesting experiment. With one button-click it attempts to auto-detect the interesting/worthwhile content on a web-page, throws out the clutter, and then presents you with that selected content as a simple page of nicely formatted text.

Before (“watch TV, use social medja, read our twits!” — blah!):

After (just read the article):

It’s intended to work on pages which have a decent amount of article text, which you’d like to read comfortably. What it needs now is a neat text-to-speech button addon, which would convert the article to speech and then add it into a combined personal daily podcast*

Running it on the Jurn blog correctly picked the most substantial post currently on the front page, the group test of business search-engines, and just showed me that. I’m impressed. Readability is another pointer (along with the excellent SurfClarity and Stylish FF addons) to a future in which the intelligent user enjoys a robustly ad-blocked, domain-blocked, user-in-control browsing experience. It won’t just be Google’s caffeine update which will be giving webjunk a hard time in 2010.

   * There are some decent SAPI TTS voices out there, believe it or not, and I can highly recommend the American-accented NeoSpeech VW Paul and the British-accented ScanSoft Daniel. If you have such extra voices, to change the default Windows 7 voice you need to delve into: Control Panel – Ease of Access – Ease of Access Center – Start Narrator – Voice Settings – then change your SAPI voice. Or you can use the TextAloud Firefox toolbar, which makes it easy to change voices at the flick of a button — although you’ll still need to edit certain words using the Pronunciation Editor, to get flawless readings.

An automated script for link/quote blogging

09 Wednesday Dec 2009

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, My general observations

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I’ve made a little script to automate a regular and tedious aspect of blogging — the hand-coding of a web link followed by a selected quote.

To use my script you highlight/select the quote you want to blog, then right-click on your desired quote. The script does all the linking and coding for you, and outputs a link/quote to your clipboard in the following manner:—

D’log :: blogging since 2000 » Trees will have their own blogs wrote…

“Maybe that’s what LOLcat is for, in the long-view — to give us a form of language that will differentiate human from non-human on the web?”

As you can see, it grabs the title from the page title, and it retains working links inside the quote. The basic format is:

   Page link + Page title / wrote… / blockquote / “your quote” wrapped in html quote marks / close blockquote

Installation:

To install it, first install the Firefox addon ContextMenu Extensions for Firefox. Then restart Firefox in the usual way.

Then to install the script in Firefox go to: Tools / Addons / ContextMenu Extensions / Options / Custom Scripts / New Items. There you can create a new right-click menu item. Title it “Auto Blog”. A blank code window will appear. Into this code window paste the Auto Blog script (.txt file). Press Apply / OK, then exit the ContextMenu options panel, and also exit the Firefox Addons list.

Use:

The script should work straight away. Highlight a quote, then right-click on it. On your browser’s right-click menu you’ll have…

I also made a slightly different scholarly version, for use with long-form essay-style posts on academic blogs — when you perhaps want to do some basic referencing but don’t want to get all strict and Harvard about it. “Auto Essay Quote” (.txt file) which, on highlighting and copying, returns a quote/link/date to the clipboard thus…

“My argument here is that the major works of Moore’s career actively pursue the articulation of an historiographic vision, one that is roughly similar to the narrative Moore describes in the interview above, but that in his actual artistic output is a great deal more complex and ambivalent. While Moore in interviews describes history as an unstoppable progressive tide, as inevitably bound to redeem us and improve our lives, in his comic book writing he is concerned with how history is made by human beings, with how history happens.”  
[ Source: The Tides of History: Alan Moore’s Historiographic Vision – accessed on 9th December 2009 ]

There’s no way for the script to grab author names unless they’re in the page title. Your milage may vary, in terms of how well a large quote line-wraps when it’s pasted into your blogging software. But both flaws are trivial matters to correct.

   (Related on Jurn: OCR from Google Books pages)

Widescreen search results

08 Tuesday Dec 2009

Posted by in How to improve academic search, JURN tips and tricks

≈ 1 Comment

In an age of 24″ widescreen monitors, why do many people stick with a long scrolling page format for search results — more suited to the age of the accounting ledger?

When the results could look like this…

How? Here’s my recipe:

The Firefox web browser, with the GreaseMonkey addon. Then add the Google 100 GreaseMonkey script, and set it to show 24 results per search page. Add the GoogleMonkeyR script, and set it up to show three columns (and to remove clutter such as “Related searches” and “Sponsored Links”).

You’ll never scroll on search-results again.

I’m assuming you already have AdBlock Plus installed on Firefox, to remove all Google text ads. The GreaseMonkey script New Google Ad-block may also be of interest, to block the page-integrated ads that Google is now adding to results.

Google Scholar H-Index for Greasemonkey

08 Tuesday Dec 2009

Posted by in How to improve academic search, JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news

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A new Firefox + Greasemonkey script: Google Scholar H-Index…

“This rough, yet useful, Firefox GreaseMonkey script will enable you to automatically display some of the most known citation indices (h-index, g-index, e-index) for any author queried on Google Scholar. […] The script currently processes just the displayed result page, and, as such, does not currently work for persons having enormous (h or g)-index (h or g > 100).”

I have to admit I’m not entirely sure how such measures work. But I assume that ‘more is better’ in terms of the starting citations needed to take a measurement. So possibly someone will hack it so that it works through 1000 search results, rather than the current 100?

Another new script of interest is Google Scholar Citation Explorer…

“An enhancement for Google Scholar that lets you see which citations a set of papers have in common. Select a group of related papers, even from across searches, and see which papers cite the whole set (or a subset of it).”