Do you use bookmarklets? They're little bits of javascript that you save as bookmarks, that do something to the page you're on when you click on them. Today I made a bookmarklet to change the formatting on any Project Gutenberg HTML book.
To see it in action, drag this link to your bookmarks bar: Format Gutenberg - then go to any Project Gutenberg book as an HTML page - try this one to begin with - then scroll down to the main text and click on your bookmarklet.
A bit of background:
I read and wrote a lot of fanfiction as a teenager, and (I suppose largely out of nostalgia) have some particular preferences about text formatting. Nowadays, I find 13px Verdana on a white background, with minimal margins and no indenting, to be the easiest to concentrate on. People talk a lot about how it's difficult to read from a computer screen (hence the rise of e-ink) but personally I suspect it's easier for me to read fiction when it's just another tab on my browser. Project Gutenberg is a massive online library of out-of-copyright literature.
I'm moving house this weekend, my exams start this Wednesday and in general, I'm pretty stressed out. I'm having a quiet evening watching comedy with my brother Pete and, as usual when I'm under pressure, obsessively coding. I've always thought bookmarklets were pretty cool (if fairly mysterious), so I had a look at some source code and had a go at working it out (I'm sure there are lots of tutorials on the internet, but I was looking for a puzzle).
My general strategy and some code: Continue reading Adventures in bookmarklet land
