via http://www.flickr.com/photos/balakov/2377782949/
Tiananmen Square on Flickr
10
Oct
Old Cigarette Ads: Doctors, Nurses, And Rock Hudson Say It’s Good For You [Badvertising]
10
Oct
Man, cigarettes were awesome in the past, if these old ads collected by Stanford University are to be believed. They calmed your nerves so you'd stop humming nervously! They soothed your throat! They made you a movie star and helped you capture animals on your big game hunt! We don't know what tobacco was made of before the mid-80s, but no wonder everyone smoked.
Or maybe it was just ridiculous advertising. Check out Stanford's full collection for more stunners like the ones below.
"Not a Cough in a Carload" [Stanford University via WeirdNewsFiles via Neatorama]
Greasemonkey Shows Off Political Colors
10
Oct
Andy Baio, a prominent blogger and creator of Upcoming.org, has released a Greasemonkey script to visualize the perceived political bias of linked content on the political news aggregation site Memeorandum. If a site tends to link to more left-leaning stories, it’s colored blue. Right-leaning linkers are red.
With the help of Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, Baio used a recommendation algorithm to analyze the last three months of linking behavior for each news source. With that data stored in a Google Spreadsheet, Baio used the Ajax support in Greasemonkey to grab a JSON feed and colorize the links. Those with Firefox’s Greasemonkey extension and Baio’s script installed will see the colorized links when viewing Memeorandum. Baio also released a full-fledged extension that does not require Greasemonkey.
This is a great example of how Greasemonkey can be used to change the way you view a page. In Baio’s case, he wanted to see the perceived bias of a site at a glance so he could choose a balanced view. The code from this project is available under the free and open-source GPL license. You could use it to create other ways of visualizing data on the web.
If you’re brand new to Greasemonkey, be sure to read my new Greasemonkey tutorial on the versatile Firefox extension. If you’ve ever written JavaScript before, you’ll quickly learn the ways of Greasemonkey, which essentially gives you the ability to insert your code anywhere in someone else’s site, but only for your own use on your local machine.
You don’t need to bite off as much as Baio, who admits this is his first Greasemonkey script. One of the biggest benefits I’ve found is that I can write code to pull out the important stuff already in the page. My tutorial shows a simple example of that, where I create a floating menu of all <h2> tags on the page. It turns out this is useful for long Wikipedia entries… and Webmonkey tutorials.
See also:
- Andy Baio: Step Away from the Computer
- GMail Adds Official Greasemonkey Support
- Run Greasemonkey Scripts in Google’s Chrome Browser
