Sunday, January 14, 2007

Large Post Editor for Beta/New Blogger

If you are like me, the small editor you get in Blogger drives you nuts. All you get is a tiny box to compose your posts and yet there is all this white space surrounding it. So, I decided to get off my butt and do something about it.

With Firefox and GreaseMonkey, I created a script based on the work of Jasper de Vries that will use 100% of the width of the screen. I then added some code to shrink the needlessly large buttons and white space on the top of the screen and increased the height of the edit box. The net result is a large post editor box that totally rocks!

So, go ahead and install it (requires that you already have the Greasemonkey add-on installed) and let me know what you think.

18 comments:

AndreiG said...

thanx, it's work!

Anonymous said...

It's working for me too. Nice works!

Greetings and lotta loves from Malaysia.

- ArahMan7

deepstructure said...

hey there, i know it's been a long time, but i just found this page. and yes, the small edit box on blogger drives me nuts, so i installed your script.

it's great, however i've noticed a problem: it only works for width on the "compose" view. you get 100% width, but the same height. any way to get the full height in compose mode? it's actually the height that im more interested, so i can see more of the layout of the document im writing.

hope this can be fixed, because it's a great mod otherwise!

Fat Knowledge said...

Hi deepstructure,

I updated the script on 10/2/07 (v1.02) so that it adjusts the height of the box based on the window size.

It works for me, so hopefully that will work for you as well. If not, you can manually edit the script to your desired height. If you take a look at the script source:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/7108

You just want to comment out line 26 by adding // to the start, then uncomment line 27 (remove the //) and change the '415px' to how many every pixels your screen has. You can just enter different values until you find what is right for you.

deepstructure said...

hey fk, thanks for responding! you're right the script does work for the height, but only in the 'edit html' tab/view in blogger, not the compose tab/view. know what i mean?

does yours work in both? here's what i mean:

edit compare pic. on the left is my edit html tab, on the right is the compose tab.

Fat Knowledge said...

deepstructure,

Ah, now I get what you are saying.

Ok, I fixed that up. Now it should work on the "compose" view as well. Just download the latest version (v1.03).

deepstructure said...

fantastic! nice work. man, after over a year of blogging this is wonderful! thank you!

azusa said...

sorry for the dummy question. but how do i install it ?
i receive the file (7108.user.js)
and then, what to do?
if i double click on it, i have an error message :
Windows Script Host
Error : 'unsafeWindow'is undefined.

what should i do?

Fat Knowledge said...

Azusa,

You must install the Greasemonkey add-on first.

Rich said...

I R <3 U!

works great, thanks a bunch!

Anonymous said...

I like this idea of this a lot. Thanks for developing it.

However, even after installing the Greasemonkey add-on, after rebooting, I'm still getting that error msg (Line 19; Char 1; 'unsafeWindow' is undefined; Code 800A1391; Source MicrosoftJScript runtime error).

Can anyone help?

Thnx.

Fat Knowledge said...

Hi Euglena,

I don't know what the problem is. If you have Firefox and Greasemonkey installed, then when you click on the link you should get a dialog box that pops up telling you that you are installing a Greasemonkey script.

If that isn't happening, then maybe Greasemonkey isn't working correctly. Maybe try to see if you can install any other scripts over at userscripts.org.

If you are able to get other scripts working, then you should be able to get this working. Then when you go to the blogger web site it should adjust the screen for you automatically.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help and best of luck trying to find the root of your problem.

Anonymous said...

Fat Knowledge, thanks for your response.

Maybe I'll wait a few days to see if anyone else responds with a similar problem, or search a bit to see if others are having similar problems with Greasemonkey. (I should be able to search on that error msg text.)

I'm a bit reluctant to just start adding scripts to see if Greasemonkey is working. I surfed around some of those other scripts, and clicked on a few. I don't understand some, don't want others, and it seems some have been abandoned or have caveats for users (some of which I don't understand).

If someone here can recommend a simple one of those with a low probability of known issues that even a script-ignorant biologist can understand, that would be great.

I'm not as capable with this stuff as some of you clearly are (I have no idea how to write a script, for example :-o ). I'm concerned that I might just complexify the problem with other factors.

I'll report back if I find a fix.

Thnks.

Anonymous said...

OK, good news. It's working & the fix was simple.

I originally clicked on your "install it" link before I installed the Greasemonkey add on. Therefore, your script downloaded onto my drive rather than installing directly.

Once I installed Greasemonkey, I was still trying to install your script by running the downloaded file. That was generating the error msg.

I deleted that file, then clicked on your "install it" link above. It installed properly, and is working fine now.

So may I recommend that you edit your first post above to instruct readers to make sure to install Greasemonkey first before installing your script. That should smooth the process. :-)

Thanks again.

A~

Fat Knowledge said...

Euglena,

Glad to hear it is working for you now. I changed the text of the post slightly so hopefully it is clearer the steps you need to take to install it.

Scribbler2099 said...

This is awesome. Great tool. Now if only there were a way to drag and drop my embedded youtube videos in the composer.

Daniel Wolf said...

Brilliant! I hated the tiny original window.

BobS said...

Original was great script. Really liked it. Now with new editor in blogger, can only get view width (1 col. of 2 col blog) in post editor not screen/monitor width. Any chance script can be tinkered so it works with new editor but has old view?
Thanks.

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