harphield.com

I mentioned the Piclens extension and it's website integration in the previos post this week. Today I was sitting at work and I got this idea - why shouldn't it be possible to use Greasemonkey to utilize the Piclens Lite javascript functions to run Piclens on any site?

Firstly, I needed a site that I would like to see Piclensed so I could experiment. Well, I chose a famous imageboard which I frequently read, and so I started working on it. My first idea was to use the PicLensLite.start() function with the feedData parameter, which would be an awesome thing if it actually could be sent to the Piclens extension itself. But unfortunately, this approach is only possible with the Piclens Lite javascript slideshow. The extension itself only accepts the RSS URL, from where it loads the data. This was an obstacle, but nothing drastic. It only required a HTML parser in PHP and voila, it's working. The only drawback is that not everyone can host their own parser/RSS generator on some server. I would be best if the feedData parameter could be sent to the Piclens extension directly.

Anyway, I give the script out for free usage and modification. It's a working proof-of-concept, and it's easily modifiable to suit any gallery site you would like to see in Piclens. All you need to do is change the Greasemonkey script to load the button in some div that is present on the site, and alter the RSS generator to parse the gallery according to the given site pattern.

I have to give credit to PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser which I used to parse the sites. And also to the creators of Piclens and Greasemonkey, awesome extensions indeed.

Download the script package here - upload the threadparser.php and simple_html_dom.php to your server, check and alter the 4chan2piclens.user.js and it's PARSER variable, and install into Greasemonkey. Every thread on the mentioned imageboard will then have a nice Piclens icon in the top right corner, which will activate Piclens uppon clicking.