I wrapped up my greasemonkey script today so, as promised, here it is. Please let me know if you have any problems or suggestions. (Screenshot posted here for the curious.)
This script adds two links to your Tumblr Dashboard that allow you to mark your current page as read. When you return later, hit the find button and it will search backwards for the last post you read allowing you to pick up where you left off. You can use the back button as you continue reading and each page should be already stored in your cache. Don’t forget to mark your last read page (which doesn’t have to be the first page) to resume next time.
There are two shortcut keys if you don’t like clicking links. They are Ctrl-Alt-M for Marking and Ctrl-Alt-L for Find Last Read.
I’ve been using various versions of the script for the last week and it’s great. I didn’t check Tumblr at all over the weekend but when I came back, the script zipped back a ton of pages and I could mark pages along the way and never lose my spot.
Boring technical stuff from here on.
How does it work? I’m not a programmer so this script is probably not the best way to do this but it works. In short, when you mark a page, it remembers the post-id of the top post and when searching, it keeps going back until the last post on the page has a lower or equal post-id than the one saved. This method does has a benefit of being pretty robust though since it won’t mess up even if you follow or unfollow people.
Script Running Slow? Since Greasemonkey acts after the page is loaded, there is sometimes a delay before the links/shortcuts are active or before it jumps back another page. In my experience, there are occasional slow loads from the Google Analytics tracker on Tumblr and from Tumblr pre-fetching images. Also, if it’s running slow or you have a lot of pages to catch up on, switch to another tab and come back later, it should keep working without you.
TODO: Remember last post on a per-account, rather than per-computer, basis. It’s possible using only tumblr and greasemonkey but I’m not sure if the effort and side effects are worth it. A temporary workaround if you really want this is to manually override the saved post-id with that from your other computer. Open up about:config and search for “lastRead”.
