MeFi Post Differentiator es broken.

June 5, 2012 8:54 AM

Why does the Pocket Chrome extension break the MeFi post differentiator?

First post in MetaTalk, so apologies if this doesn't fit.

I'm using the MeFi Post Differentiator style via the Stylish Chrome extension. Yesterday I updated a few of my other extensions, switching from an old ReadItLater extension to the new Pocket extension. However, after some seriously scientific turning on and off of all of my extensions, I've determined that the Pocket extension breaks the super-handy J/K navigation made possible with the Post Differentiator style. I use both extensions frequently and would hate to get rid of either.

Any ideas why this is happening? If this isn't the proper forum, where should I turn?

Mac running Snow Leopard, Chrome and all extensions up-to-date, restarted, cleared cache, yada yada.

posted by denriguez to MetaFilter-Related at 8:54 AM (7 comments total)

There's no official support for outside scripts, so while MeTa isn't technically the right place (and we'll tell you to contact the person who made the script originally) often people can hash out what is going wrong with your setup over here. So drop the person who made that script [he is crunchland on MeFi] a note and see if he has any ideas. Or he'll probably show up here at some point and you can ask him.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:58 AM on June 5, 2012

I haven't the slightest idea why the script would break anything. All it does is add a css style to surround the posts on the front page with a slightly different background color. I have no way to test it, but if I had to guess, it would be the declaration of "display: block;" that it has for each post, though I can't fathom why you version of chrome wouldn't support that.

Stylish allows you to edit the script. If you want to try and see if my idea is correct, try editing the script. I can do it by clicking the Stylish icon up by the url address bar, and click "edit" when I'm on metafilter. You could try removing the lines in each section that say "display: block;" and see if that is what's causing the issues.
posted by crunchland at 9:34 AM on June 5, 2012

This is unrelated to why pocket extension is breaking things, but the J/K navigation is built into MeFi--no extension is needed. I guess Pocket is overriding key presses?
posted by skynxnex at 9:36 AM on June 5, 2012

Ah, thanks, everyone. I'll check it out and report back if I figure it out. And thanks, Jessamyn, for not nuking my post. :-)
posted by denriguez at 1:05 PM on June 5, 2012

Yeah, it's got nothing to do with Post Differentiator. If you navigate to niloccemoadcdkdjlinkgdfekeahmflj/1.1.1_0/js/ under your Chrome profile's Extensions folder, there's a file keyboard-shortcut.js file that begins with

document.onkeydown = function(e) {

Just put a big comment around everything in that file (insert /* at the beginning and /* at the end) and restart Chrome (since apparently it aggressively caches extension JS) and you'll have your J/K keys back. You could also change it to use document.addEventListender if you really wanted to still use the Pocket shortcut, but it seems like they really didn't test this at all since the shortcut is ctrl-shift-P which is already taken by Chrome for "print directly using system print dialog instead of print preview", so I don't know what these people were thinking.
posted by Rhomboid at 1:42 AM on June 6, 2012 [1 favorite]

(*/ is the close comment)
posted by Rhomboid at 1:43 AM on June 6, 2012 [1 favorite]

You, sir, are a genius. Works like a charm, and I don't use that Pocket keyboard shortcut anyway. Thanks so much!
posted by denriguez at 9:09 AM on June 6, 2012