Killing Twitter's stupid Activity sidebar

[nonelvis]

Twitter recently introduced an "Activity" feature that's supposed to show you what your followers and people you follow are up to. And I love you all, but I just don't care about every single tweet you favorite or who you've decided to unfollow.

Fortunately, you only need a tiny bit of CSS to hide that irritating sidebar area, so I ventured into the world of Greasemonkey and was able to pull together a script in a matter of minutes, thanks to a handy API that supports CSS insertions. (We shall not discuss the temporary foray into Google Chrome extension development. I may have nightmares about DOM scripting.)

Anyway, if you're as annoyed by change as I am, you're welcome to use my script.

Greasemonkey
Link to the script: Kill Activity Sidebar 1.1

Install on Greasemonkey the usual way.

Chrome
Mercifully for us non-programmers, Google provides a handy script import feature. Follow these steps:

1. Go to my greasemonkey directory home page.


2. Click on the link reading "Clicky." This is the only link on the page, so hopefully you can't screw up this part.


3. Chrome will kindly warn you that you're about to load a potentially dangerous script. Confirm you want to load it by clicking "continue".


4. You should then see a message asking you if you want to install the script. Go ahead and do it.


5. Reload Twitter and bask in the empty space where Activity should be.

Safari users: I'll look into Safari extension development soon, not in the least because I'm a Safari user myself. If there is any justice in this world, it'll be easier than Chrome development. *shudder*

Standard disclaimer stuff: script provided without warranty or any guarantee of support. Probably won't make you or your browser break out in purple polka dots, but use at your own risk.

Finally, if there's demand and/or I get bored enough, there will probably be a future version that kills the Activity tab as well. If I make one, I'll update this post with the link.

Comments

[wendymr.livejournal.com]

Surely Adblock Plus's Element Hiding Helper would do the same thing without a lot of coding?

[nonelvis]

I have no idea. I use Adblock in a couple of my browsers, but configuring it in Safari is so painful that I've never tried to do anything in it other than basic ad-blocking.

In any case, writing and testing the Greasemonkey script was literally only ten minutes, and eh, it's probably good for me to look into Safari extension development anyway.

ETA: Indeed, it'll block it in Safari, so thanks for the suggestion.