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There’s a new version of the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet tonight with a very nice new feature: you no longer need to turn off popup blocking in your browser’s settings in order to use the bookmarklet.

This is probably the most common cause of confusion for new LGF users who want to use the “Create a Page” feature to post their own articles, because most of the popular web browsers come out of the box with popup windows blocked, by default, and in some browsers it isn’t very easy to find the settings you need to change. So I’m really pleased to find a solution that lets the “Create a Page” bookmarklet work without having to change any settings. The Internet is confusing enough already.

It’s also nice because now you can turn popup blocking back on (if you previously disabled it to use the bookmarklet) and enjoy a world mostly free of advertising popups.

To install the new version, just right click on the current one in your browser’s bookmarks bar and delete it (if you previously installed it), then drag that big “Create a Page” button to the bookmarks bar in its place.

The technical details of this change, for those interested: I learned something new today, by Googling for “bypass popup blocking” — I discovered that browser popup blockers generally already have a workaround built in. If the popup window is the direct result of a user action, typically a mouse click or tap on a touchscreen, popup blockers will allow the window to be opened. No problem, go right ahead sir, we know you, you’re the guy who clicked.

But if the Javascript code is trying to open a popup window in an indirect or deferred way, it will be blocked. By “indirect,” we can mean inside a timer routine, or in the case of the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet, in the callback function of an Ajax call.

Once I grokked this essential fact about popup blockers, the solution was obvious — open the popup window right away (with a “loading” message) in the direct context of the click, and save that window’s handle. Then instead of using window.open in the callback function, just set the location.href property of the new popup window, to reload the correct page with all of the LGF Pages posting tools ready to go.

(This process happens so fast you may not even see the “Loading…” message when the window first opens.)

Here’s the actual “Create a Page” bookmarklet code in editable form before it’s all scrunched down and transmogrified into the bookmarklet you install.

(function() {
	var postPage = function() {
		var api = 'http://littlegreenfootballs.com/api/0.2/postRegex.json',
			opts = {
				url: api
			},
			browser = navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase(),
			ff = browser.match(/firefox\/(.*)$/);
		if (ff && ff.length > 1 && ff[1] < 21) {
			opts = {
				url:			api + 'p',
				jsonpCallback:	'lgf_api',
				dataType:		'jsonp'
			};
		}					
		jQuery.ajax(opts).done(function(lgf) {
			var esc = function(s) {
					return escape(s).replace(/\+/ig, '%252B');
				},
				ob,
				v = '1.0.6',
				f = a = q = w = '',
				u = esc(location.href),
				d = document,
				t = esc(d.title),
				s = esc((d.selection) ? d.selection.createRange().text : d.getSelection());
			if (u.match(/www\.npr\.org/i)) {
				ob = jQuery('a.download');
				if (ob.length) {
					a = esc(ob.eq(0).attr('href').split('?')[0]);
				}
			} else if (u.match(/www\.rightwingwatch\.org/i)) {
				ob = jQuery('#content-area object embed');
				if (ob.length) {
					if (ob.eq(0).attr('src').match(/www\.youtube\.com\/v\//i)) {
						f = 'https://www.youtube.com/embed/' + ob.eq(0).attr('src').split('?')[0].split('/')[4];
					}
				} else {
					ob = jQuery('#content-area iframe');
					if (ob.length) {
						f = ob.eq(0).attr('src');
						if (f.substring(0, 2) == '//') {
							f = 'http:' + f;
						}
					}
				}
			}
			if (f == '' && lgf !== undefined) {
				ob = jQuery('iframe').filter(function() {
					return this.src.match(RegExp(lgf.regex.embed, 'i'));
				});
				if (ob.length && !u.match(RegExp(lgf.regex.sites, 'i'))) {
					f = esc(ob.eq(0).attr('src'));
				}
			}
			q = (
				'u=' + u +
				'&t=' + t +
				'&f=' + f +
				'&a=' + a +
				'&s=' + s +
				'&v=' + v
			);
			popup.location.href = 'http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/lgf-postpage.php?' + q;
		});
	},
	jqVersion = '1.9.1',
	d = document,
	popup = window.open('http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/lgf-postpage.php?loading', '_blank', 'width=670,height=820,scrollbars=1,status=1,menubar=1,location=1,resizable=1');
	if (window.jQuery === undefined || window.jQuery.fn.jquery < jqVersion) {
		var done = false, s = d.createElement('script');
		s.src = '//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/' + jqVersion + '/jquery.min.js';
		s.onload = s.onreadystatechange = function(){
			if (!done && (!this.readyState || this.readyState == 'loaded' || this.readyState == 'complete')) {
				done = true;
				jQuery.noConflict();
				postPage();
			}
		};
		d.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s);
	} else {
		postPage();
	}
})();

For more information: LGF Pages bookmarklet.