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Just Host cPanel cleanup script for Greasemonkey

Mostafa — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:48:47 +0000

I finally decided to get my own domain and signed up with Just Host for the registration and hosting. For now I’m only using it to host this blog that originally started its life on Blogger. The transition was fairly smooth, save for a few minor issues. I’ll talk more about the steps involved a future post (a draft is already in the queue) …

Just Host offers cPanel as a web frontend for managing and running site related tasks. It’s quite a nice tool but there is one big problem. The interface is literally littered with a bunch of annoying ads and affiliate links. Even more annoying is the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any way of permanently moving these offending boxes to the bottom of the screen. This is where Greasemonkey comes in.

Greasemonkey is a nice little extension for Firefox that allows the execution user scripts to change the way a website looks. userscripts.org is a great place for finding scripts that work on major/popular sites on the internet. A search there didn’t turn up anything useful so I decided to write my own. Install Greasemonkey if you don’t have it already and then click on this link to get the script installed. I’ve also put up a copy on userscripts.org.

The script works by setting the ‘display’ style of the offending div boxes to ‘none’. Firebug is another great tool that makes it a breeze to find out the IDs of the divs that need to be blacklisted.

[Update 10-Nov-2009]: Looks like some sneaky new ads injected using Javascript have shown up on the cPanel sidebar. Unlike the old ad boxes however, these lack div IDs. As a result, it is not possible to simply blacklist them. Fortunately, it also means that it is possible to turn the table around by simply blocking the sidebar divs that have a null ID. The script has been updated.

Before:

Before applying greasemonkey script

After:

After applying greasemonkey script

Status report

Mostafa — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:51:28 +0000

Looks like it’s been more than a year since the last time I’ve published something here. I’ve just been really busy, now more than ever. I have been periodically saving some blurbs as drafts but I never quite seem to have the time to polish them into real posts.

I really should be working on my thesis and a number of other papers but it does get a bit tiresome. Whenever that happens, I’ll work a bit on the drafts as a distraction and hopefully manage to push a few of them out over the coming weeks…

Moving from Blogger to WordPress

Mostafa — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:28:27 +0000

The initial move is easy enough using the Blogger importer plugin of WordPress. Setting up redirects from the old blog to the new one however takes a bit more work. I followed the instructions at:

http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2006/05/move-blogger-to-wordpress

First blog

Mostafa — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 19:54:00 +0000

Well .. I’ve been giving this some thought .. the main motivation behind starting this thing is the fact that I seem to forget a lot of the stuff that I found out digging through the web, linux man pages etc.. let this be my (somewhat) permanent record of the things I do .. to save myself the trouble of backtracking through memory lane…

I guess this will be mostly computer related .. Linux, TeX, etc..