Taist: power up your Internet

we Invite the web developers, particularly with experience creating/using userscripts, to become beta testers of the project tai.st — a new method of improving sites by users.




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What is it?

Improvement of sites forces users through extensions to the browser and userscripts — are becoming more popular, including increasingly discussed at Habra. But although new improvements are used they are very weak and a very small number of people — too awkward to use, difficult to create and to promote.

So we decided to do Taist technology, a critical key issues custom improvements and allowing to receive maximum benefits, developers of improvements, and their users.

Following will tell you about the problems, about how we are going to tackle them, and what it will give.


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Existing problems

(the examples are for Google Chrome, other browsers have similar extensions, but he didn't use them — search by words userscripts, userstyles)

There are three main technology advancement of sites by users

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custom scripts — userscripts.org and customers to it, type Blank Canvas Script Handler and TamperMonkey

custom styles sites userstyles.org and stylebot.me the

• extensions to browsers, sharpened to a specific site

Although their functionality and complexity are different, they all have common drawbacks:

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• Improving need to look for — need to think "and what are the upgrades for this site?", go to each of the sites stores styles/scripts/extensions, look for and try found. Rarely someone does that, unless there's a serious problem, so by improving only to reach a small portion of its users.
  
  
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• Improvements need to promote — as the user seldom find the needed improvement, the authors have to write about it on external resources, which represent only a small portion of potential users.
  
  
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• Hard to write your improve need to learn additional syntax and API user scripts and extensions, browsers support them differently is particularly difficult to build early improvements.

the Result: the use and especially the creation of the majority of improvements available only in this most advanced web developers (only custom styles relatively "close to people").


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Our solution

The essence of all changes — to adapt technology, sharpened by the geeks, to a wider range of users.

the Specific changes:

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• Suggest improvements automatically — when you visit the site to recommend the suitable most popular improvement automatically. This will solve a user's problem on the choice of improvements, the problem of the author to promote improvement in weight. Now this can be done: the sites platform and the improvements themselves are just not adapted for this interaction, as most users anonymously it is impossible to determine even the most popular improvement, not to mention more "smart" recommendations.
  
  
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• Simplify the creation of improvements — so that improvement could be generated, while on the page, a simple JavaScript and CSS, without the need to learn additional APIs.

Even these measures require a lot of work and do not fit in the ideology and architecture of existing technologies, so we create a Taist.

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Join us!

If you are interested to try the "userscripts on steroids" and help us as a beta user, join beta testing first the beta version we will release may 13th (closed alpha version is already created and tested). Promise active interaction and feedback — it is on this basis we will create a new, convenient tool.

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru