Greasemonkey Hacks

Hack #91. Find Out Who's Reading What You're Reading

Use Feedster to find weblogs that link to the current page.

Feedster (http://www.feedster.com) is an RSS search engine that tracks tens of thousands of weblogs and news sites in almost real time. Not only is it a great way to find out what people are talking about, but it can also be used to discover what pages people are linking to.

But why limit yourself to searching manually to find out who's linking to a particular page? This hack adds a window that floats above web pages and shows you who is linking to the page and what they're saying about it.

Warning

Because this script gets information from a central source (Feedster), the operators of Feedster will be able to track the pages you visit. By default, this hack will not retrieve any information from Feedster until you click the triangle icon to expand the OmniFeedster floating window. You remain in control of when the script "phones home" to Feedster.

The Code

This user script runs on all http:// pages.

Tip

For privacy reasons, it will not run on https:// pages unless you explicitly change the default configuration.

The code is divided into three parts:

1. The getFeedsterLinks function is the main entry point for retrieving information from Feedster. Feedster provides link information as an RSS feed. All you need to do is construct the appropriate URL and then parse the XML results. The getFeedsterLinks function retrieves the Feedster RSS feed with GM_xmlhttpRequest, parses it with ...