A Grab Bag of Bookmarklets
A (semi-) frequently updated list of simple bookmarklets I've found somewhat useful. Some of the more complex ones for use on twitter.com (Custom filtering of the timeline and Hovercard removal) are discussed in more detail elsewhere on the site. The below are a collection of short and sweet bookmarklets that do a simple but effective job.
DeCluttering Twitter, Part Deux
If you're just here to learn how to kill the Twitter Hovercards, then drag the Hovercard Removal bookmarklet to your browser's bookmarks bar, go twitter.com, click it and you're done!
Read on if you're in any way curious about the technical errata behind this..
Most of my twitter usage comes via applications that makes use of the API, such as Tweetie on the iPhone or the Echofon plugin for Firefox. However, I still spend a considerable amount of my time a-tweetin' via the web interface.
For the most part, twitter's web interface is reasonably clean, but there are still a few niggly bits that I'd rather do without. Luckily, one of the beauties of the web interface is that it allows the usage of bookmarklets, so if there's something you don't like, a quick line of javascript in the browser's address bar will sort it out!
I've written previously about using bookmarklets to hide tweets from your timeline that contain blacklisted words (sport-related, xbox achievements, etc). The next step is now to use bookmarklets to tweak the web interface itself. A nice side-effect of Twitter's use of jQuery for the web interface is that all of the jQuery selectors and functions are available to us, should we need them.
We'll start by hiding the Hovercard!
DeClutter
Updated 28/03/2010 - changed how the bookmarklet re-applies itself to now work in realtime, rather than at clumsy, staggered intervals.
Twitter can be a very useful tool, particularly once you've built up a decent-sized network of people with interests common to your own. The twitter timeline is often compared to being in a pub filled exclusively with your friends, and being able to hear all of the conversations going on at once.
However, just as you have that friend who occasionally likes to go in to excrutiating detail about his collection of porcelain squirrels, there are times when your interests diverge and you'd rather not hear the full details of next weekend's Porcelainathon. And so it is with Twitter.
Once you've started following more than a handful of people, you'll occasionally find your timeline filling up with tweets about things that you're really not that interested in. You'd rather not take the nuclear option and unfollow those involved, as they generally have interesting/useful tweets. But equally you'd rather not have to scroll through 3 pages of automated tweets about foursquare checkins, app downloads and the like.
Enter DeClutter
DeClutter is a javascript bookmarklet which will remove from your timeline any tweets which match a "blacklist" of keywords you've defined.
Below you can enter a series of terms which you want to banish from your timeline (one term per line). After entering them, you can either copy and paste the resulting javascript in to a bookmarklet in your browser, or drag the DeClutter link at the bottom of the page to your browser's bookmarks bar.