Introduction
The Climate Audit Assistant is a script that automatically enhances the Climate Audit blog. It provides additional features and fixups not possible through the Climate Audit host site.
This is being made available to alleviate some of the hassles of using the new CA site, as well as other sites that participate in the Open Science process.
UPDATED: Version 0.0.9 (build 41) available Jan 20, 2010. Existing users click on “Settings” then “Check for Updates”
What this provides today:
– Comment ‘Tag’ buttons above the Reply box
– Comment preview (click to toggle between preview/edit modes)
– Replies include thread links; “Paste Link” feature also provided for referencing multiple comments
– Comment sorting and thread enable/disable – new comments always collected together, even if nested!
– Color-coding of newer comments, and/or hiding old comments
– Ability to update to new CA Assistant version within the script (see the Settings popup)
– Works on all Open Science Web Ring blogs
– (new!) Reorganizes “Recent Comments” list to more easily see which topics have been updated
– (new!) Lucia’s blog has faster/better support
– (new!) Hides old comments while retaining their (author/date) context (on RomanM and Lucia’s blogs)
What this will provide soon (we hope):
– A way to incorporate images (for now, our host disables images in comments)
– Dynamic adjustment of old-comment hiding
– Repair data file links, to point to climateaudit.info
– Other fixups
System Requirements
Firefox browser (link)
Greasemonkey Add-on for Firefox (link)
The CA-Assist script itself (link)
Installation Process
- Firefox browser: install and use the Firefox web browser. (It won’t interfere with the operation of other browsers you may use, and can even import your bookmarks for your convenience.) Install using the link above.
- Greasemonkey Add-on for Firefox: Greasemonkey empowers your custom scripts to change the behavior of web pages on the fly. You just run the CA Assistant inside of Greasemonkey. Install using the link above.
- The CA Assistant script: this does the real work.
- Go to http://www.climateaudit.info/ca-assist/ca-assist.user.js
- If GreaseMonkey is properly installed, you should get a popup screen with an “Install” button. Click it.
- Click the Settings link (top right of the web page) to customize to your liking.
Installation is complete! Your ClimateAudit experience will now be a bit more friendly.
HINTS
- (Assuming your Status Bar is turned on, View->Status Bar), notice the GreaseMonkey (in Color
or B&W 
) in the bottom right corner of your browser. Click it to enable/disable GM and the CA Assistant (if it is not in color, the CA Assistant won’t work) - To use most of the Comment editing buttons, just press the button to insert the desired features. The “Link” and “Image” buttons just need to be pressed, and they’ll lead you through.
- This script is enabled for multiple WordPress sites, and you can try it on others. See below.
SETTINGS
There’s a settings popup available in the top-right corner of the page. Open it, modify the “General” and “Comment” tab settings as you see fit, and save. The next time the page is redrawn, the new settings will take effect. (Eventually, some of these settings will be more dynamic, taking effect immediately. Sorry, not yet!)
General Tab:
- Logging: for debug purposes. You can ignore.
- Reorganize Recent Comments: sorts recent comments list (sidebar), making it easier to see active threads. (Currently supported only on some sites)
Comment Tab:
- “Old” and “New” comments are defined by age in hours.
- You can hide all old comments (default: 48 hours). Hiding older comments is a great way to simplify your view of more intense discussions. (On Lucia and RomanM’s sites, the content of old contents disappears, but Author/Date remain. Nice!)
- Comments can also be color-coded by age: old (gray bar), normal (yellow bar) and new (green bar).
- Comment threading can be enabled or disabled. With older comments hidden or color coded, threading becomes a more reasonable proposition.
- Comments can also be sorted: newest at the bottom (default) or at the top of the page.
HAVING TROUBLE?
- If you have a “NoScript” add-on installed, you’ll have to stop such script-blockers from interfering with this script.
- Please do report success and failure here!
TO ENABLE FOR OTHER SITES
1) Visit your favorite WordPress site
2) Right click the GM logo and choose “Manage User Scripts” from the menu. (If necessary, click “CA Assistant” in the list on the left.)
3) Click “Add…” in the “Include” section on the top right, and press “OK” a couple of times to save the new site-name pattern.
If you don’t like the results, it’s easy to undo this using the “Delete” button you’ll find in the same place.
(It doesn’t look quite right on some sites. Eventually this will all get better…)
Yes, you can use “http://*.wordpress.com/*” if you like, to cover a lot of sites at once.
HISTORY
1 Jan 2010 0.0.3: Bug fixes
8 Jan 2010 0.0.8: Bug fixes, now supports all Open Source Web Ring sites (CA, Dan H, Jeff Id, Lucia, Roman M, WUWT), Comment sorting optional.
20 Jan 2010 0.0.9: Improved support for Lucia’s blog. “Recent Comments” reorganized on some blogs. Settings popup reorganized.
Climate Audit 
169 Comments
Whoa! Quite an improvement over an already quite-acceptable site!
I shall now hit the tip jar rather heavily, Mr. McIntyre! You – of all the posters on all the sites on the Innertube – deserve it most of all!
I don’t usually comment at this site — our of my area of expertisebut I just wanted to say that I wish other sites had these capabilities
Very Nice! I especially appreciate the nested comments feature. So far, everything appears to be in proper working order.
Re: Matt Pearson (Dec 17 14:06), I do too and I am replying to this old comment as a test.
Thanks,Mr. Pete. The instructions worked perfectly.
Great job.
One interesting effect is that i am already seeing posts for Dec 18. I guess it depends on where the server is sitting.
Yes, a great help to retain the nesting and also to have the comments pull the nested thread into ‘last=post’ order.
Amazing stuff you guy do at CA.
TL
Thanks, everyone! I just couldn’t stand leaving it the way it was.
And unfortunately, I have enough background to know that we don’t have to live with whatever technology “they” give us. Just don’t understand why nobody did this sooner. (Guess who burned some nonexistent “round tuits” to get it done 🙂 )
Once this tool is finished, I’m guessing a few other sites will appreciate having it. (I at least want to get the easy-update aspect in place so you can get updates by just clicking a button.)
Very well done, Pete. Thanks for the tremendous efforts you all have made.
Thanks Pete. Now it’ll be easier to find bender!8
It’s a wonderful script! Add to my italian blog and publicize to my friends. Thanks Pete 😉
Third try :
[Super and Sub are not for LaTeX 🙂 … In LaTeX you just use up-arrow (X^2):
]
Linux kernel 2.6.26-19
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (lenny), fully updated
Iceweasel 3.0.6*
Greasemonkey 0.8.20080609.0 (installed from Debian archive with aptitude)+
CA Assistant is running, looks good so far.
* – Debian version of Firefox, might not be compatible with add-ons for most recent Firefox updates/releases
+ – May not be latest version available for Firefox
MrPete: Thanks for all the hard work.
The text on Firefox looks lighter than on IE, almost as if it’s a different font. Is that normal, or is it something I can adjust?
nice, thanks a lot Pete. Surprised Word Press doesn’t automatically include this function. It wouldn’t work for me until I uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox and went direct to add-ons.
Wonderful! Works exactly the way you described. Thanks Mr. Pete!
wordsabove andbelow
Test again Reinstalled GM and CU script
Bold Italic
Basesuperscript
Basesubscript
Copied Equation with new tags from button
Feel free to delete all this!
Still no joy with superscript/subscript. This is still sooo much better! Thanks again.
jim
Re: Jim (Dec 18 23:58),
Test super/sub again
New version super script x2
New version subscript x3
Looks great in preview! Thanks Mr Pete!
Re: Jim (Dec 18 23:58),
Superscripts/subscripts shows fine in preview but does not show after I post it. Strange!
It’s like it used to be….?
Thanks Pete….
Thanks for an improvement that makes things better.
Thanks Mr. Pete! The CA Assistant script works great.
Install notes for any who have issues:
1. On my machine, Firefox needed a second restart for GM script to become functional.
2. NoScript co-exists fine, simply whitelist (‘allow’) climateaudit.org. You do not need to ‘allow’ wordpress.com for script functionality. (Minimizing the number of unrestricted sites is much better for security.)
MAJOR update to CA Assistant.
Please uninstall the old script (GreaseMonkey->Manage user scripts… select and press “uninstall”). Then try the new one.
See the updated post above for the MANY new features. Almost everything I’ve hoped for.
Still some visual tweaking needed, and someday I hope to add dynamic hiding of old comments. But this will help, I hope!
Re: MrPete (Jan 2 01:29),
DUDE!!!
Re: MrPete (Jan 2 01:29),
Script works great… Greasemonkey is very cool.
Can I make a suggestion about the settings UI location? Users seem to be having problems locating the settings popup. It would be helpful to have the settings in a floating collapsible sidebar, instead of (or in addition to) anchoring it on the page header.
UI controls should be contextually located. Since the settings primarily affect the comments presentation, those UI elements should be near the comments. If they were floating nearby, they would always be at hand to modify the presentation as needed. Floating elements can be annoying, so it should be a small floating anchor in a neutral color. The settings dialog would pop out when clicked. Users should also have the option of turning it off and using the link in the page header.
This is fairly simple to do in JQuery:
http://www.jqueryplugins.com/plugin/204/
http://www.dvq.co.nz/web-design/creating-a-sliding-sidebar-that-follows-the-user/
The hard part is making it look simple and clean, organic to the page design.
Re: Robert Arthur,
Unfortunately, jQuery UI is currently incompatible with GreaseMonkey 😦
Thinking about sliding sidebar for settings and more… not sure a) exactly what we want, b) if it is worth attempting before the jQuery folk fix the incompatibility problem. (They say they hope to have it fixed by version 1.9 or 2.0)
Now, where’s the add-on for Safari and Macs?
Re: John Baltutis (Jan 2 03:04),
This has worked for others on FireFox for Mac and Linux.
Sorry, there’s no equivalent to GreaseMonkey for Safari, IE, etc. I’ve heard it might work on Opera.
Re: MrPete (Jan 2 09:12), This is great! I works just fine with Firefox on my Mac.
BTW – what is the “Enable Logging” setting and what is it used for?
Re: ErnieK (Jan 2 12:52), Never mind – I found it – it went off the side of the page (window too large).
Hi Mr. Pete,
There is a greasemonkey add-on for IE. Just downloaded it, but I think it is too old for your script. It has a version number of 0.1 and it is dated July 30, 2006. I found it at gm4ie.com. I would play with it more, but this is a backup computer. When I get my main system back up, I will see if I can compile the latest Firefox add-on source code for it. I prefer IE8 64 bit, though flash, etc. do not run yet on IE8-64.
Re: cdquarles (Jan 10 18:39), I played with GM4IE a bit. It is not just old. It has no support for any significant JavaScript code. I couldn’t even get to square one with it…. a basic demo page.
Thanks Mr. Pete. I am still working on restoration of my main system. Totally flustered with it. I think that I can port the most recent GreaseMonkey source. I like challenges :).
I am running CA-Assist [CA] 0.0.7 (Build 24),
and when I view the The FOI Myth #2 I only see a dozen or so comments.
On Climategate on Finnish TV I see no comments.
Re: jeez (Jan 2 06:10),
By any chance do you have “Hide Old Comments” checked?
This will make older comments disappear, according to the Old-age setting (age in hours).
Uncheck “Hide Old Comments” to see the older comments. Or just set Old-Age to a bigger number.
Re: MrPete (Jan 2 09:10),
Thanks. RTFM, D’oh.
Oh, I’m running Firefox 3.5.6 under Windows XP.
Ok, that wasn’t hard. Thanks much Pete, especially for the hiding of old messages. Now I just need to figure out where the unhide button is at.
Re: Dave Dardinger (Jan 2 09:53),
That was also easy. I just noticed the Reply button gives us a header too. Great!
[tongue in cheek] Since the newest messages are green and the intermediate aged ones yellow, I was expecting the old messages to be highlighted in Red, so I was disappointed that they’re in boring grey! [/tongue in cheek]
Thanks again
What the heck?
I posted here 3-4 days ago, and the post showed yesterday, but it doesn’t show now. Did somebody remove it?
I said I could not get this to work, even though I have the Grease Monkey logo in the lower right in color. I am running Windows XL and Firefox 3.5.6 on a Dell 8300.
Could someone please let my posts stay on? When I got email saying there were comments here, I thought I had an answer from someone. Now I have had to ask again.
Re: SteveGinIL (Jan 2 11:19),
OK, an uninstall and reinstall got it working. I did that several times the other day and got nothing. But it is working now.
For as few people as have probably installed this, there seems to have been ab inordinate number who had trouble getting it to run. Someone might want to look into that.
Re: SteveGinIL (Jan 2 11:48),
This is a brand new version of CA Assistant so anything you tried before today is of no interest, which is probably why your post was removed as it’s now moot. The previous version had considerably less capabilities, and isn’t really available any more so a post saying it wouldn’t work would just confuse people.
Note: I say the above with a bit of trepidation as it starts to sound team-ish, but I think there’s a difference…. And the code is available.
Sorry SteveGinL,
Dave guessed correctly. This is not a normal blog post — it is a page about this particular “feature”. And with the entire CA Assistant rewritten from scratch, I didn’t want to confuse everyone with discussions about the old version.
The new one has its own issues, more on other sites than CA. Bug reports much appreciated.
The reason your new uninstall/reinstall worked is that the code has now been replaced 🙂
Re: MrPete (Jan 2 15:32), Cool! Thanks, MrPete. For the coding, the help and the clarifications. Remove this, too, if it is getting in the way…
MrPete,
Thanks a bunch… the new features are a great addition to the usability of WordPress. The enhancements I’ve tried so far work as described.
MrPete, I have two observations:
1) With the “Hide old comments” box CHECKED then new comments (yellow and green) that are attached to old threads (gray) do not show up at all.
2) With the “Hide old comments” box NOT checked, new comments to old threads (gray) do not seem to be sorting to the bottom. They seem to stay with the with the old threads making it necessary to scroll through all the comments to find the newer (yellow and green) comments that are attached to gray threads.
If I turn OFF the “Threaded display” then the new comments do sort to the bottom in both cases.
Firefox 3.5.6 for Macintosh running OS 10.5.5
Re: ErnieK,
New comments attached to old threads should still show. Just no context. If that’s not working, Hmmmm….
When old comments show, the threads DO move to the bottom, but including context. So, if you add a comment to a 2-yr-old thread, that whole thread goes to the bottom.
If I didn’t do it that way, threaded and unthreaded would be the same.
Would love inspiration for something better. (What I want to do soon but it is quite hard: provide a slider so you can expand/shrink the display.)
One thought is to somehow “shrink” old comments without making them completely disappear. Just not sure what it should look like, nor how hard to mangle things to work that way.
don’t know what is wrong, but those features just ar not working for me. Maybe because it is the Mac version.
As a test, I just un-installed both Greasemonkey and CA assistant, quit Firefox and then restarted and reinstalled them. I posted a reply to Mat Pearson’s old comment (third from the top – posted Dec 17). I quit and restarted FF again entered this blog. My new comment is still attached to Mat Pearson’s comment and still 3rd from the top it was not sorted to the bottom.
If I change the settings to hide old postings, reload the page, then Mat Persons and my new reply are both gone.
If I change the settings and UNCHECK “Threaded Display” then my new reply does sort to the end and shows up as the latest posting and it does not matter if hide old posting is checked or not.
Something in the sort is not working right for me.
Re: ErnieK (Jan 2 20:19), I just noticed that Bob Koss commented on the same issue in the “The FOI Myrh #2” topic (Jan 2 @ 4:43AM & 5:06AM).
Thanks Pete – only just got round to installing this. All good so far!
It sounds like you are continuing to update the script.
Can you put a date beside the link so we know when an update last occurred?
I am no longer sure when I installed the script and have no idea if it is the latest!
Thanks!
Yes, I’ll date the link, and incorporate changelog soon.
Sorry for delays, have run into a serious bug in the jQuery toolkit being used that causes major trouble in the next version 😦 …
I just wish I knew something about javascrip and jQury. I have been trying to find out why the thread sort does not work for me at all. It seems that function getMaxTreeID(a) always returns the ID for the first comment no matter what. The first comment ID in this blog is 020993. I planted the following DEBUG’s:
function getMaxTreeID(a) {
// Return max id from a and its child comment objects
var maxC=getCmtNum(a);
DEBUG(‘maxC_for_a: “‘+maxC+'”‘);
$j($j(cmtForm.itemElm),a).each(function (i) {
var cNum = getCmtNum(this);
if (cNum < maxC) {
DEBUG('cNum: "'+cNum+'"');
maxC = cNum;
}
});
DEBUG('maxC_returned: "'+maxC+'"');
return maxC;
}
It seems that “cNum” is always == 20993 so it will always be <= maxC so it is always returned. I really don’t understand the “$j($j(cmtForm.itemElm),a).each(function (i) {…” part of this, but if it is supposed to find the ID of the child that belongs to 209933 and then move on to the next nested thread, it isn’t doing that (for me). Thread 0209996 has a child (0214063) which should cause it to sort down. Any ideas why the thread sort doesn’t work on my Mac version of Firefox?
Part of the Log window (botton up):
…
Jan 3 8:28:37 PM maxC_returned: "0209933"
Jan 3 8:28:37 PM cNum: "0209933"
Jan 3 8:28:37 PM maxC_for_a: "0210111"
Jan 3 8:28:37 PM maxC_returned: "0209933"
Jan 3 8:28:37 PM cNum: "0209933"
Jan 3 8:28:37 PM maxC_for_a: "0210111"
Jan 3 8:28:37 PM maxC_returned: "0209933"
Jan 3 8:28:37 PM cNum: "0209933"
Jan 3 8:28:37 PM maxC_for_a: "0209996"
Jan 3 8:28:37 PM maxC_returned: "0209933"
Jan 3 8:28:37 PM cNum: "0209933"
Jan 3 8:28:37 PM maxC_for_a: "0209996"
Jan 3 8:28:37 PM maxC_returned: "0209933"
Jan 3 8:28:37 PM maxC_for_a: "0209933"
Jan 3 8:28:37 PM cmt setup: comments cleaned up
Jan 3 8:28:36 PM cmt setup: hidden
Jan 3 8:28:36 PM Define main functions
Jan 3 8:28:36 PM Set up masthead
Jan 3 8:28:36 PM Completed initialize.
Re: ErnieK (Jan 3 23:54),
Have just finished fixing some other things. I’ll look into this next and try to provide some debugging tools so you can help nail this down.
THANKS for digging in!
Re: ErnieK (Jan 3 23:54),
Found it. Fixed in the current version. Thanks for your patience.
Re: MrPete (Jan 8 13:18), Thank you, MrPete, for fixing it. It is so much nicer when the new threads sort to the bottom. I can even hide the old comments now.
Using version 0.7, even better, thank you.
Request #1: no sliding toolbars please, or make it optional?
Request #2: comment numbering, to aid the reading of old threads contained in-thread numbered references, apparently from a time when CA did have numbered comments.
Nested comments are nice when reading a ‘finished’ thread, but I find them difficult to use when the thread is developing.
Re: oneuniverse (Jan 7 10:16), I should have written version 0.0.7 not 0.7.
Re: oneuniverse (Jan 7 10:16),
MrPete, I think I misunderstood the mention of ‘sliding toolbar’ – I thought you meant a toolbar that slides around the window to always keep itself on-screen as the user scrolls about the document. Please strike that request/wish if you were referring to something different.
Re: oneuniverse (Jan 7 10:16),
You understood sliding toolbar partly correct. What I want is a tool (optional yes) that stays on-screen. The tool will itself be a “slider” control to dynamically adjust how many comments you see, by age. (If you’ve used the free picasa photo software, it has a similar slider for photo searching by age)
Comment-numbering the way you want is unfortunately impossible, and also tends to be unreliable, particularly on older threads:
1) The comment numbers always referred to the visible comment number at the time the comment was written. Those numbers changed as comments were moderated, moved to other threads, etc.
2) In the new system, we cannot change the information generated by the host system.
3) Unfortunately, #2 means the only kind of numbering available is generated by your browser, i.e. 1-N based on the currently visible comments at the outermost level. Pretty useless.
Bottom line: that’s why the new Reply/Paste links are based on author/date/time instead of comment numbers.
Re: MrPete (Jan 8 08:12),
Thanks MrPete.
I’m guessing I’d still find an option to recreate comment numbers useful, even if the references by comment end up being a bit off – except for periods with high commenting rates or high number of posts that need to be removed, I’d expect the numbering errors to be small. (?)
But anyway, there doesn’t seem to much demand for this feature other than from me 🙂 . And I realise it could add to the confusion.
Minor point : when old comments are highlighted, a color-scheme of dark gray on light gray is used – one has to strain slightly to read it.
Re: oneuniverse (Jan 7 10:29),
If you want to read it, don’t call it “old” — just make your old setting even older 🙂
MrPete,
How about killfile capability where you could hide posts of individuals on a list? I’ve installed the one from the link but I haven’t tested it yet.
Re: DeWitt Payne (Jan 12 18:01),
The killfile addon for GreaseMonkey works at The Air Vent, but not at The Blackboard or CA.
Cool change to Recent Comments, thanks MrPete
Hi MrPete, your assistant is wonderful but I’ve found a problem. I want to direct people to the climate science page on my website, but it cuts my URL short. Needs room for 3 more characters.
??? Sorry, I don’t know what the “it” is that is cutting your URL short and/or has too little room?
Re: MrPete (Jan 27 00:51), I seem to have sorted it out, don’t know what it was but it doesn’t matter now. Thanks for help.
Version 0.9 that is supposed to be better at The Blackboard, isn’t. The reply with link button and color coded highlighting of the author of a post that used to be there is now gone.
DeWitt,
There’s a bit of synchronization needed with Lucia :)… I may have released the new version too early.
Patience, and I think you’ll see CA Assistant working again on her site without a further update on your part.
So, is there an assistant off in the future that’ll support Macs and Safari? I’d kill to be able to disable threaded comments. It’s slow torture to go through comments in its default state.
Firefox on Mac works. GreaseMonkey is a req’t, and not available on Safari (yet).
Thanks, but not interested in using FireFox. No other way to suppress threaded comments?
Not without breaking it for everybody.
The link to Sylvie Gravel’s manuscript from here
which should be here — http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/others/browning.pdf
does not seem to work.
Yes, fixing those links is a future-feature.
Had trouble installing the Java Script. At first I thought it was interference from Firefox preloader, but nothing worked until I disabled all my other add-ons. Java Quick Start may have been the baddie, but I also disabled IE Tab, LastPass, and AdBlock Plus.
Very impressive, though I was spooked when initially I could not find a 2-day old comment of mine on a thread.
Sorted out now, but does it have to hide old comments by default?
Yeah… I think I’ll change the default in the next version.
The CA Assistant script has terrific features. Like Henry, I’d like to control when older comments are condensed. I read
Um… the popup is in the top-right corner of what page? I can’t seem to figure out what it is or how to open it.
> SETTINGS — There’s a settings popup available in the top-right corner of the page. Open it, modify the “General” and “Comment” tab settings as you see fit, and save.
This is still a mystery to me: In FireFox 3.6, what would the “settings popup” look like? I’d find it in the top-right corner of what page?
SETTINGS — OK, got it. With the CA Assistant script running, it’s at the top-right corner of every “Climate Audit” web page. The word “Settings” is in yellow type. Cool!
Re: Oliver K. Manuel (Mar 16 10:15),
Because Paypal is how donations happen 🙂
Many thanks for this. Have installed and am of to try my first post using it at WUWT…:-))
great script, great improvements.
I have found it very useful. Unfortunately with the change in the Wattsupwiththat format the “reply with link” link is missing there.
The preview panel is there and seems to work, just the facility with linking to the post quoted is lost.
😦
I am relying on the assistant for previewing messages for WUWT , and it is great for long posts.
But preview is the only thing that works after the change of format on that blog few weeks ago.
I no longer get color for newer, nor Reply/link which were very useful when they were working.
The links used to work from the preview panel so one could check if they were correct, but now
one has to post to see them.
Any hope?
anna
Re: anna v (May 26 00:40),
Sorry anna, life’s been busy. I’ll look at an update when I get a chance. Since it’s been almost six months, perhaps the underlying tools have improved enough that I can make some other improvements as well.
What a tool I have been… How silly of me that I until now didn’t bother downloading this amazing tool. Long time reader but have managed with the posts in the old-fashioned cumbersome “survey and semi-read-all” approach for keeping taps on interesting discussions. Only the recent, rather interesting, fast-flowing discussions at recent posts made me give in and download. I now wonder what kept me from doing it much sooner.
Merely posting this to bump the thread into “recent posts” and potentially inspire others to utilize the assistant as well. Oh, and also to say thank you MrPete for a job very well done.
Chrome, Safari, Opera users: does CA Assistant work for you?
Safari (Mac, Windows) now has GreaseKit, which is eventually supposed to support all kinds of GreaseMonkey scripts.
Opera (Mac, Linux, Windows) has a similar GM emulator function.
Chrome (Mac, Linux, Windows) now has native support for GreaseMonkey.
In theory, even IE can handle GM scripts, if you install Trixie.
And of course, GM was originally designed for FireFox (Mac, Linux, Windows.)
So… with these advances and discoveries: can anyone confirm whether CA Assistant works on Safari, Opera, Chrome and maybe even IE? I’d love to update the top post with how-to’s for these other browsers!
Hi MrPete
what is the Installation Process for IE?
Cheers
dougie,
I don’t know. The link to “Trixie” above is for an IE add-on that supposedly enables GreaseMonkey scripts to work in IE. Follow the instructions there and see what you can find!
This first round of experiments will require folks who have some technical expertise. Once we know how it works, we can write simple instructions for everyone else.
ok MrPete
no probs, will have a play & get back to you with any further comments/queries.
1st attempt, can’t get it to work, but late & I’m probably doing something stupid 😦
thanks for all your time on this.
much appreciated.
In IE8 i now get a ‘error on page’ message on bottom left status bar on all CA tabs – message on opening reads –
Webpage error details
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Timestamp: Thu, 2 Sep 2010 18:58:09 UTC
Message: ‘return’ statement outside of function
Line: 72
Char: 2
Code: 0
URI: https://climateaudit.org/ca-assistant/
not sure if that helps anyone?
Installed all conponents, have SIMBL, GreaseKit, and the CA Assistant installed and selected w/Safari 5.0.1 on Mac OS X 10.6.4. However, there are no features or settings available. Thus, I conclude, it’s a bust.
Re: John Baltutis (Sep 1 17:28),
Can you see any difference on CA with it loaded?
– top right of each page should have (linkable) text in gold
– Recent Comments list should be reorganized
– header of each comment should look different
– Post a Comment area should have a toolbar and a Preview button
If nothing at all… yes a bust on Safari for now. I’ve got some new Mac Mini servers here so eventually may be able to diagnose this.
Thanks for trying!
Nothing! ‘Tis a bust. No changes at all. The mechanism works as far as getting the GreaseKit menu and having your script show up as an option. Maybe the script needs tweaking, but that’s beyond my ken.
I just put it into Chrome. All I had to do was start up Chrome, navigate to CA, then to this page and clicked on the link to the script and chrome did an automatic install. From there I verified it by opening the Tool menu, selected extension and there it was:
Not seeing much difference so far, but then again I mostly had used IE8, but the Chrome rendered page runs faster and looks sharper, and Lucia’s loads very fast compared to the click and wait when using IE8.
Re: boballab (Sep 1 20:45),
Sounds great! See my reply above (MrPete (Sep 1 22:04)) for the kinds of things that ought to be different if it is working.
No Joy it doesn’t put an Icon up on the screen for me to click on to set options nor have an options menu under the extensions manager. I downloaded a Chrome extension that works with wordpress so you can compare the the two and see what I mean about the option menu.
The wordpress extension placed a small WordPress Icon in my top toolbar that lets me open it, don’t have that with CA assistant. unfortunately I’m not that up on Java script but you might want to download Chrome and do what I did and put in a known working extension and pull up the script in the Developer option under the control the current page menu.
The script installed with no error message, shows up in the extension manager but just has no options settings and no features in use.
Re: boballab (Sep 1 23:02),
the options are not in the extensions mgr. they are on-screen at the top-right of every CA page. 🙂
Will work on further customizations for chrome when i get a few more round tuits available.
Re: MrPete (Sep 1 06:08),
Thanks to all who have tried out these options. Some of them appear to hold great promise. But as you’ve seen, CA Assistant doesn’t yet work on other browsers.
It’s still fine on FireFox. Hopefully we can extend the list in the not-too-distant future.
New at this, but the page/site I want it to work on most ( http://wattsupwiththat.com/tips-notes-to-wuwt/ ) saving settings and then refreshing page has no effect. I use 96 hrs. to define “old”, and request hiding, but all 1740 responses since 7/27 still show, not even color-coded. The site list includes http://wattsupwiththat.com/* .
Re: Brian H (Sep 9 03:34), I use NoScript, but it shows no blocked scripts from CA Assistant. Are there others that need to be OKed?
More problems arising. Reply and Reply w Link both come up with Undefined NaN …. and usually fail to position properly in the thread.
Update way overdue.
Re: Brian H (Nov 8 07:57),
Which site(s) give you “Undefined NaN”?
Here http://judithcurry.com/2010/12/17/agu-fall-meeting-part-ii#comments e.g. But I’ve been using Opera a lot lately to cope with memory tie-ups, and don’t see the scripts much.
Re: Brian H (Dec 18 23:08), Threaded sites produce multiples of Reply-w-Link tag (2 – 12 or so), and they don’t work properly, or sometimes at all.
Changing “Settings” on one site affects all sites, which is very inconvenient, since different situations exist depending on # of comments, threading type, etc. Often the controls appear on the upper right, and appear properly, but nothing actually happens – Eg: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/03/has-the-bbc-has-broken-faith-with-the-general-public/
(I have screenshots of some of the above, but can’t attach with the Image button, which wants URLs only.)
Any chance that the Latex in a comment could be compiled in the preview?
Not sure the comment belongs here, but one aspect of the site is driving me nuts. With CA assistant either on or off, the name of the poster is obscured by the data on when posted. I am running a pc with Mozilla Firefox. I have the latest firefox version, but it has performed the same way on all the earlier versions, as well. Is this a characteristic of the site, or is there a simple fix on my end?
I suddenly seen to have a problem editing comments both here and
at WUWT.
Both site editing problems seem related to changes coming quietly
from wordpress.com, and not announced through standard Climate
Audit or WUWT site announcements.
Here, once the comment goes longer than the first frame of the
comment box, I can’t scroll up or down to edit text or html
… especially if I’ve “pasted” in material from a text file
or set up a link to additional information. There’s no bar at the
left side of the comment box to use to scroll up or down…
although I can use the arrow keys to move within the box.
Is this some sort of work in progress ?
[RomanM: This appears to be something new implemented by WordPress. I tested it and when I reached the bottom of the box, it expanded automatically so that I could still see my entire comment.
The same feature has also appeared at my own WordPress blog.]
hi Steve, many thanks for your august work !
I am new to the world of climate hoo-haa and wonder if you had ever looked at Applied Mathematica by Shaw and Tigg? It has the most marvellous elegant simple yet incredibly powerful algorithm section in one of the later chapters called “maximum entropy data reconstruction”
I found a copy on the net : http://www.fishpond.com.au/Books/Applied-Mathematica-William-T-Shaw-Jason-Tigg/9780201542172?cf=3
mine is somewhere, hmmm, an algorithm for finding lost books….
The time series previous chapter is also a hoot.
Keep up the fabulous work, all the best
Craig
Have just upgraded everything and CA assistant no longer works. Or rather it’s clearly working far too effectively in that it’s hiding almost all the comments, presumably those older than a certain age. If I bring up the settings box then I can’t see anything between the three buttons at the top and the three at the bottom – just a big black space.
Windows 7/firefox 5.0.1/greasemonkey latest version/CA assistant 0.0.9 Build 41
Downgrading to firefox 3.6 has solved the problem; I can now see the controls and set them up as I wish,
I’m now having exactly this problem with Firefox 9.0.1. For other reasons to do with making another program work (not understood) I’ve had to change profiles and start again with no add-ons, cookies etc. When I install Greasemonkey and CA Assistant the settings box is blank and many comments (like all on this thread) suppressed, exactly as described by OP. I have reasons not to want to go back to 3.6. I know this ‘churning’ of versions in the open source world is a pain to the part-time developer but I wonder if MrPete has any clues of what the problem is, so that I can fiddle with the code myself with a bit more direction.
I’ve fixed the problem by manualling editing prefs.js in the new profile I’m using – something that’s not recommended by Mozilla! First quit from Firefox. Then copy all lines in prefs.js starting with
from the profile you’ve been using (and happy with) and replace all those in the new profile of the same form. But don’t replace or change anything else!
Clear as mud I’m sure – if you google prefs.js it may become clearer. This would allow Oxbridge Prat to use a more recent version of Firefox, for example. It can’t help you though if you’re starting with a more recent version and trying to install and configure CA Assistant for the first time.
manually editing!
I seem to be having trouble installing the script.
GreaseMonkey installed just fine, but CA Assistant refuses to do anything. Clicking ” Install” does nothing. I tried disabling the ” Java” add-ons as someone suggested, but I am still having the same problem.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
J. Felton, I had that problem too. Reinstalling greasemonkey fixed it. No, this doesn’t make sense, but it did (at least in in my case) work.
Dear Mr.McIntyre:
I need to get in touch with you re hockey style graph related business opportunity. Pl respond to my email and I will send you the detail.
Thanks
with warm regards
Ashok
I am running firefox 9.0.1 and comments appear as usual. when I click on settings the three buttons on top are inactive too. I guess I was lucky that the change kept the desired parameters.
anna v (Jan 5 at 3:59 AM): Perhaps it’s truer to say that I’ve been unlucky in the last 24 hours. I don’t think my problems were caused by upgrading from Firefox 8 to 9. But what I assume is true is that every existing user of CA Assistant is living on a bit of a knife-edge as they upgrade beyond Firefox 3.6 and anyone coming in to CA or WUWT or the other blogs for the first time with a more modern version will not have much joy with CA Assistant.
Re: Richard Drake (Jan 5 04:06),
Yes, for reasons unrelated (online work requires using only FF 6, 7, or 8) I have not upgraded to 9, despite repetitious prompts by the FF updater. This is one more reason to hold off.
BTW that bit mentioned above about the date etc. making the poster’s name unreadable is a real PITA. The only workaround I’ve found is that hovering the pointer over the gravatar image (if present) pops up a micro-bio with the name in full.
Ouch.
OK, I’ll schedule time ASAP to review browser compatibility and see what I can do to clean this up.
I’ll also check to see if there have been any library upgrades that may allow us to improve the CA Assistant in other ways. (One hoped-for fix is to make photos-in-comments workable…)
Testing …
aaa
Re: MrPete (Jan 5 11:01),
It would help me if you’d publish (here) the values that the settings for Greasmonkey/CAA can have then it would be possible to edit them manually via about:config
For example, “isOld” takes a numeric string and I’m guessing it’s in hours but can’t be certain.
Another one is “bHideOld” which defaults to “checked” but “unchecked” doesn’t seem to be the correct value.
I’ll probably “Use the Source” but I think a posting here (perhaps at the top so it stays visible?) would be nice to have.
bob
Re: bob edgar (Jun 5 04:30),
No need to manually edit the settings. Have you noticed the little control panel at the top-right of the screen when in a CA-Assistant active site?
Mr Pete
I’ve long used Ca-assistant here and at WUWT. Recently I installed it at Tallblokes Talkshop (WordPress) but while I have the array of formatting buttons, the Preview does not function. Any ideas? Thanks for your help. It’s a wonderful tool.
Re: Lucy Skywalker (Mar 31 04:38),
I’ll take a look. Grrr… looks like FireFox is changing itself in ways that break various scripts, and the scripting tools (Greasemonkey etc) are not keeping up.
To make matters worse, we still don’t have the anticipated future improvements allowing me to “upgrade” the CA Assistant to be even better. In fact, those improvements appear to be even further behind.
I’m going to adjust my hopes: at this point, simply to ensure what we have continues to work properly on current browsers. And yes, I can potentially get it to work properly on new sites such as at Tallbloke…
Mr Pete, the problem is that under certain combinations of browsers etc. that control panel becomes unusable. There are work arounds (downgrade the browser, set the settings, re-upgrade the browser) but these are annoying. See the discussion above.
Indeed. None of the controls does anything any more. I’m happy to have the Reply box icons, and leave it at that.
I use FF exclusively, and it’s been close to a year since my last attempt to make the controls do anything. No longer bother with them.
Re: Brian H (Jun 6 05:01),
Ouch! OK, I’ll take a look. What version of FF on what platform?
Re: MrPete (Jun 6 06:23),
I’m running the “update channel” release which gets bumped frequently. I just went from 12 to 13 this morning. Up thread I think I saw someone trying to use 9.
In any event, I made an error in my post yesterday. The “unchecked” does work, I need to do a restart (I don’t think a reload worked).
I think that the tech savvy people here could easily work around this particular problem if you’d simply name the variable and the values it can take like (as I remember) the instructions on the settings dialog did.
Re: Brian H (Jun 6 05:01),
I just made an installation on a fresh FF 12 running on Win XP. Also upgraded FF to version 13.0 afterwards. I only had a problem, and this same problem I’ve had with various versions of FF on both Linux and Windows platforms, being that when you click the “settings” link the whole settings window is black/unusable. The workaround is simple: just click “save settings”-button and then start it again (click “settings” link).
As Mr. Pete comments above, Firefox has been changing so quickly that I’ve run into many sites not working properly with it. If I see something funny-looking, I try the site with IE 9 and any problems are almost always resolved.
Re: Jean S (Jun 6 06:51), that sounds like my problem. Thanks for the workaround suggestion.
Re: Oxbridge Prat (Jun 6 10:00), the workaround from Jean S works perfectly on my new firefox ESR 10.0.4. Thanks again.
Re: Jean S (Jun 6 06:51),
I can confirm that this fixes the missing settings box (Firefox 13), thanks for the tip!
bob
There may be an issue over at Lucia’s site with thread reordering. I’m seeing the newest posts at the top and then the older posts below that. I think the issue is likely related to the fact that here post count just passed 100K since it seems that posts above 100000 are at the top and 999xx are still at the bottom.
bob
Re: bob edgar (Jul 26 04:40),
I was just coming over to post the same this I am having the same issue.
Thanks
Re: bob edgar (Jul 26 04:40),
Strange. Will check it out ASAP.
Re: MrPete (Jul 26 11:52), Workaround from DeWitt Payne
Since this is a global setting (I think) I’m not sure what effect it will have on other sites but it WorksForMe @ Lucia’s.
Hi Steve,
I just installed CA assistant, and wanted to let you know about a couple of things. Minor issue, it’s unclear what page is being referred to for settings. I thought initially that it meant the top of some page within the greasemonkey logo or somewhere else… It might help if in the current description you added: “There’s a settings popup available in the top-right corner of
thethis webpage page.”More important – I use addblock plus, and with it enabled, the settings page pops up fine, but is only a blank black box, no text or selections available, even tho the “general, comments, and about” links are there, and the buttons at the bottom show up too.
Once I disabled adblock plus, the selections appeared. So you might want to add a note letting folks know that if the settings dialog box has no options, they may need to try disabling adblock or other similar ad blocking programs.
Thanks so much for creating this script! I’m looking forward to trying it. I wish it worked on other sites, especially ones that use the disqus commenting system as so many sites seem to be using it now – and it handles any text copied into it dismally, adds in hard returns where there weren’t any, extra paragraph returns, etc. But it will be great to have it for wordpress sites!
Kind regards,
Robin
For those that use Safari I have found a nice option.
I am running Safari Version 6.0.2 (8536.26.17) and OSX 10.8.2
NinjaKit will run GreaseMonkey scripts in the current version of OSX and Safari. After the script is installed just restart Safari and reload this page; now clicking on the .js file (here) or above should present you with a dialog box asking if you want to install the GreaseMonkey script.
You will now have a Ninja Star shaped button immediately to the left of the address bar that allows you to adjust all the scripts and settings.
After installing the script I found that clicking on settings in the Climate Audit header presented me with a blank box. To resolve this I just clicked “Save Settings” and then immediately re-clicked on “settings” and now I have all the options visible.
Hope this helps and remember to uncheck “hide old posts” first to make sure you don’t miss anything you don’t intend to at first!
Re: Seth (Mar 21 18:08),
Thanks, Seth!
(BTW I’m sensing new versions of Greasemonkey and jQuery may soon be released that enable us to finally update and upgrade CA Assistant…)
Halp! the settings controls are blanked out (black box), and now the icons in the Reply (Post) entry boxes are gone, replaced by text buttons. Updates informs me I have the latest (0.9). Some sites show no comments, even recent ones. Attempts to re-download and install the script fail. Greasemonkey is coloured, and apparently fine.
Because of Judith Curry’s interest this week in CA Assistant for Climate Etc, as sold by Steve Mc, I got looking at the code again and thought it might be worth upgrading to the latest jQuery (2.0.3) which no longer supports old versions of Internet Explorer (removing over 10% of the code that is completely wasted in this context). It seems to work as much as the current version (it should be faster) and I’ve pushed the result to a GitHub repository:
https://github.com/rdrake98/ca-assist
This is really a notice for hard-core coders and (possibly) hosts of blogs that are currently usefully supported by CA Assistant. Email me for the URL that will allow you to test everything is as it should be and (MrPete willing) to contribute to a GitHub ‘wish list’ for the future.
My email is rdrake98 on the gmail label.
Help pls, had to reset Firefox, have GM and CA script back in place and apparently operating everywhere apart from Climate Audit! The settings popup available in the top-right corner of the page, stubbornly refuses to appear. Have deleted and installed GM and CA assist in every combination I can envisage.
Don’t have Noscript, do have Adblock Plus, but did before?
Not having color-coded by age is a real pain
TIA for any help you can give
regards GS
I recently changed laptops and am trying the CA assistant on the http://wattsupwiththat.com . The italics worked but the links became blank erasing the word also at preview level.
wattsup has recently changed format . Could that be the trouble? when I go to the script page there exists nothing even though it gave me no errors whilc downloading it. ( also from the little image on the right top). I restarted firefox to make sure. the same
thanks
anna
Like some other users above I have been forced to update my firefox installation, and as a consequence the CA assistant is no longer working properly on any of my systems.
As far as I can tell it is installed and running (the edit box changes when I turn greasemonkey on and off), but I can’t access the control panel (absolutely nothing appears in the top right hand corner), so I can’t turn or thread reordering and colour coding, which are the key features I use.
Would it perhaps be possible to get a version where reordering and color coding (but not hiding old comments) are turned on by default?
CA Assistant was working for me until I reset Firefox to default to fix another problem, not saving preferences. That meant I had to reinstall Greasemonkey. I think that’s the problem. The CA Assistant script is no longer compatible with the current version of Greasemonkey
I went back to the oldest version of Greasemonkey that was compatible with Firefox 33 and it still doesn’t work correctly. In fact, now I don’t even get the edit options. So it’s not just Greasemonkey. There’s some setting in Firefox that was changed when I reset to default that eliminates the color coding and the ‘reply with link’ button.
I have now got everything working in Chrome! The secret is to install tampermonkey, and then install the CA script.
There is still the traditional problem that the settings window doesn’t work the first time you open it, but it does work on the second time, so all is well.
(FWIW, I’m about to put some time into bringing this as up to date as I can, and also see if GreaseMonkey etc have improved enough to allow some of the additional features we’ve always wanted…)
Mr Pete,
I have installed firefox, greasemonkey, and the ca assistant script. I see the latter listed in greasemonkey. Can you provide a simple example how to use a latex formula using these codes?
I thought I saw that wordpress can now allow latex. Why didn’t Stephen activate that option?
Jerry (hrhrbb@gmail.com)
Sadly things seems to have broken again on chrome – I think tampermonkey may have been updated.
Jonathan,
It looks like Climate Audit has implemented https. The script is not set up to run with the https address, but you can modify it within Tampermonkey to allow it to run:
Open Tampermonkey, click on “dashboard”. You’ll see the Climate Audit script listed. Over on the far right side of the listing is an edit icon. Click to edit. Then, under the settings tab, you can add https://climateaudit.org/* to the list of allowed sites (in the leftmost box in the second row titled User includes). Once you’ve done that, close the Tampermonkey tab and go to or refresh Climate Audit and the script should run and comments should be reordered by date.
I hope that helps.
We all owe a huge debt of gratitude the Steve McIntyre. The global warming hacks have been picking the pockets of American and other taxpayers with their false narratives for too long. I recommend the “Hockey Stick Illusion” book which I just finished reading. Where is Steve’s book? He needs to write one.
Does anyone know how to get CA Assistant working in the new Firefox?
Hmmm, I have Grease Monkey working on this newer version of FireFox. And CA Assistent seems to be enabled, but I do not see extra functionality.
OK it is indeed the HTTPS. Here is how to fix.
Go into script to edit and change the following section:
// @include https://climateaudit.org/*
// @include http://www.climateaudit.org/*
into
// @include https://climateaudit.org/*
// @include https://climateaudit.org/*
// @include http://www.climateaudit.org/*
// @include https://www.climateaudit.org/*
Or simply replace the HTTP version with the HTTPS version:
// @include https://climateaudit.org/*
// @include https://www.climateaudit.org/*
And it works 🙂
Jaap,
How to you save the changes, i.e., which editor is being used?
Jerry
Jaap,
Figured it out.
Jerry
Jaap,
Figured it out.
Jerry
5 Trackbacks
[…] to CAEconometric ReferencesBlog Rules and Road MapGridded DataTip JarAboutCA Assistant « […]
[…] The very simple installation instructions are here: […]
[…] January, 2010 (12:48) | Gadgets and Toys Written by: lucia Mr. Pete kindly extended his Climate Audit Assistant and modified my blog comments.php file to play well with his script. I asked him to do this because […]
[…] https://climateaudit.org/ca-assistant/ […]
[…] You can however use Firefox and Greasemonkey to edit and preview some comment functions, see the link in the Test page. Combine Greasemonkey with the CA Assistant (developed for Climate Audit by Mr. Pete) and you have a way to fully preview and edit comments prior to submitting – see details here […]