headbonk.com

Just discovered this howto:
http://my.opera.com/Rijk/blog/2006/07/11/mailto-to-webmail

It explains how to setup Opera to use just about every popular webmail program to handle mailto: links using only preferences settings.

This pretty much makes my SquirrelTo script pointless.

Update Aug. 21, 08:
This script is actually kinda pointless as there exists a better way to do the same thing.

My hosting company provides webmail access with SquirrelMail. In the last few years I’ve taken to only using webmail and not even having a mail client installed on most of my machines. Why bother with downloading all that mail directly to my computer. My host provides plenty of storage for cheap, so why not just keep all my mail on the server?

So anyway the problem comes up when you click on a mailto link on some web page. These are becoming pretty uncommon these days as they tend to attract spambots to the address they point to. When I do click on one, the browser always ends up spinning it’s wheels launching Outlook Express or Evolution or whatever the default mail client is on that machine. I need a way to just open up the web page to write a mail with SquirrelMail.

Enter Opera UserJS…

The Opera Web Browser has a nice little feature for hackers like me… You can install javascript scripts that modify pages as you view them to tweak them to your own preferences or add new features to your user experience.

squirrelTo is my solution to the problem. squirrelTo re-writes mailto on web pages as you browse them and turns them into links that will open a compose window in your squirrelMail server to the address pointed to in the mailto link.

To use this script, save it to your Opera User JS directory and, very important edit the following lines:

/*********************
Configure options here
*********************/
 
// Change this variable to point to your squirrelmail install
var squirrelPath = "http://example.com/path/to/squirrelmail/src/";

You must change the “http://example.com/path/to/squirrelmail/src/” to the corresponding address and path of your squirrelMail instance for this to work at all. Also, it only works you are already logged into your squirrelMail server when you click on the link. If not, it just takes you to the login page of you your server.

Download SquirrelTo 0.3 for Opera UserJS here Right click on this link and choose to save the target to your UserJS folder. If you’re not familiar with Opera UserJS, I suggest you check out this tutorial here.

Oh yeah – for greasemonkey users… I haven’t tried it with greasemonkey and I bet it doesn’t work, but I bet it wont be too hard to make it work or copy the idea. If you convert this to greasemonkey let me know and I’ll link to your script or bring in your changes…

I’ve been pretty excited about the new canvas tag ever since I first read about it a few months ago. For that matter, I’ve been pretty excited about the whole WHATWG proposal for (X)HTML 5. My day job doesn’t leave me much time for recreational hacking, but this weekend I cobled together this simple demo.

Little graphical hacks like this is what got me into programming waaay back in the day writing in Basic on my Atari 400. Atari Basic was an easy way to learn programming and see visual results easily. This motivated me learn vector math and simple wireframe 3D rendering… A whole career ensued…

Now it seems that todays equivalent of hacking basic is hacking Javascript.