Thursday, January 19

Idea: “Realistic Preview” Greasemonkey Script

I was thinking of a post I’d like to write that would have some floated images, but hitting the wall that previewing such posts is kind of a pain in Blogger. The issue is that the Preview feature doesn’t give you a good enough sense of how the post will look on the blog itself. The font size, body width, leading, etc., are all off. So I wouldn’t be able to tell if the images were too big, or needed borders or padding, or any number of stylistic things.

It would probably be pretty trivial to hack up a Greasemonkey script that would add me-specified styles to the Blogger posting page that could show the Preview in something more approaching my blog’s style.

Though I’m realizing now that Camino, my browser-of-choice du jour, lacks Greasemonkey support. Maybe a bookmarklet could do the trick?

(By the way, my favorite source for seeing people push Blogger’s envelope is Freshblog. Go Blogger hax0rs go!)

There are so many possibilities for merging posting and blog pages that I’d like to get some more of this homebrew rocking, as a good testbed for what’s useful enough to actually implement for reals.