Since I first published the tr-rectify Greasemonkey script to ease my TechRepublic reading experience, Chad Perrin joined the project. He and I have improved the script apace. Among the changes we made a while ago is that for every element the script hides, it sports a little white-on-blue “+” that you can click to expand it. We then made tr-rectify remember which elements you left expanded and which collapsed, so you can tune your visibility preferences.
One problem that regulars experience with the TechRepublic discussions is in “catching up” — returning to a discussion of one or two hundred comments, and trying to find all the comments that you haven’t yet read. In thinking about how to solve this problem, I thought about adding a widget to allow you to hide all comments posted before a specific date/time, but that has complications not only in the implementation but also in usage.
Then it occurred to me to use our existing framework for collapse/expand. All comments now start out in life expanded, but they each get a little “-” in the upper right-hand corner. If you click it to collapse the comment, all that’s left of it is a “+” with which to re-expand it. Since every comment on TechRepublic has a unique message ID, I use that ID for recording your preference for expanding/collapsing that comment. This works both in Expanded and Collapsed discussion modes.
So, to use this facility for weeding out comments you’ve read, just collapse each one as you read it. You can always expand it later. If you want to take a peek at all comments, just disable Greasemonkey temporarily by clicking on the monkey icon in Firefox’s status bar.
