12-13-2007

pitchforked • Greasemonkey script

Let’s face it: I don’t visit Pitchfork for the writing. When I read their reviews, I just can’t help but think of the goth kids from South Park, shaking their heads and calling me a conformist. But I continue to visit the site because they cover a lot of ground and will often link to audio and video samples.

Over the weekend, however, I got sick of digging through the drivel just to find a few audio nuggets, and I decided to do something about it. I put together a Greasemonkey script that replaces the top banner on Pitchfork with a scroll box containing all of the mp3 links on the page. I call it pitchforked — clever, right? Here’s a screenshot:

The script isn’t perfect, and it certainly isn’t pretty, but it does the trick, for the time being. Eventually, I’d like to expand it to also link to streaming audio, video, etc., but haven’t gotten that far just yet. And of course, if Pitchfork were to ever redesign their site, all would be lost.

To start using pitchforked, you’ll need to first install and activate Greasemonkey. Once you see the smiling monkey in the bottom right corner of your browser, click through to the script file: pitchforked.user.js. When you click on the file, you should see a dialog box asking you to install the script; otherwise, either you or I have done something terribly wrong.

Once installed, take it for a spin. So far, I’ve found that paging through the news section seems to turn up the best links, but forkcast ain’t bad either.