I’ve been a fairly consistent user of reddit almost since its inception. It’s elegant, simple, and the links are fairly good. What’s also good is the discussion. Reddit takes the unusual step of ignoring chronology when laying out comment pages: new comments start at the top, and high-quality comments stay there.

This fluidity means that reading the discussions is—on the whole—a positive experience. It also means, however, that the layout of the threads on a given article can greatly change from one visit to the next. They have several built-in features that help you find your old comments and their replies, but I wanted two additional features, so I made a quick Greasemonkey user script to add these.

Reddit Highlighter

To use this, you must install the Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox, or run Opera, which supports user JavaScript.

What does it do?

The first thing the script does is add a “context” link to every comment listed on a user’s summary page. The context link functions in a manner identical to the original comment permalink: it links to the page of all comments, with the exact comment linked by its in-page anchor.

Presumably, the rationale for moving to individual pages for comments was to avoid the so-called “permalink” breaking when its corresponding comment was pushed to the second page. Indeed, my implementation won’t work on comments off the first page. But then, for a comment down that far, I probably wouldn’t worry too much about checking up on the replies to it.

Anyhow, once you click through to the actual comment page, the second part of the script comes into play: marking off comments belonging to the logged-in user:

It’s just a subtle little thing, the blue triangle, but it can help you scan a whole page of responses and quickly zone in on the threads you participated in.

Mike

← Earlier Later → Posted at 2:44 pm to Internet, Web Tech.