labs · better netvibes · 2008
Better Netvibes
Better Netvibes was a Greasemonkey userscript for Netvibes, the French personal start page, released on 18 January 2008. Netvibes laid out RSS feeds in tabs of little boxes. The script added the two buttons it lacked: one to refresh every feed at once and one to mark every feed as read.
The problem it solved
A Netvibes page could hold dozens of feeds spread across several tabs. Catching up meant visiting each tab and clearing each box. The original page put it plainly: "Ever wanted to mark all of your Netvibes feeds as read, and it felt really boring to click on each tab one by one?"
A userscript was the natural fix. Greasemonkey, a Firefox extension, ran your own JavaScript on pages you chose, so you could add features to a site you didn't control. Better Netvibes was written with MooTools, because Netvibes already loaded MooTools itself, which kept the script small.
Version history
- 0.1, 18 January 2008. First release: Refresh All Feeds and Mark All Feeds as Read.
- 0.2, 30 January 2008. Fixed to work with Ginger, the new version of Netvibes.
- 0.21, 15 May 2008. Fixed a condition that failed after Netvibes renamed the class of one of its elements.
That last entry is the whole story of userscripts in one line. They depended on someone else's markup, so every redesign could break them, and the blog's 30 March 2008 post is about exactly that.
Since then
The script was listed on userscripts.org, the main userscript directory of the time, which went offline in 2014. Userscripts themselves survived: Greasemonkey is still around, alongside managers such as Tampermonkey and Violentmonkey that work across browsers. Netvibes was bought by Dassault Systèmes in 2012. And "mark all as read" is now a standard command, usually a single key, in every feed reader worth using.
The userscript file is not hosted here.
Ever wanted to mark all of your Netvibes feeds as read, and it felt really boring to click on each tab one by one ? Ever wanted to refresh all your feed in a single click ? Well now you can do this with Better Netvibes.
Better Netvibes is a greasemonkey script, so it’s written in JavaScript. It uses the excellent mootools framework, since Netvibes is already using it.
Maybe I’ll add some functionality in a next release.
Feel free to report any bugs or any suggestion in the comments.
Version History
2008-01-18 : v0.1 · Initial release · Refresh All Feeds · Mark All Feeds as Read
2008-01-30 : v0.2 · Code has been fixed, now it works with Ginger.
2008-05-15 : v0.21 · Fixed one of the if conditions that made the script unable to work after netvibes changed the classname of one of the elements