A better webpage filter

[Anton Vredegoor]

John J. Lee wrote:

> http://webcleaner.sourceforge.net/

Thanks, I will look into it sometime. Essentially my problem has been 
solved by switching to opera, but old habits die hard and I find myself 
using Mozilla and my little script more often than would be logical.

Maybe the idea of having a *Python* script open at all times to which 
all content goes through is just too tempting. I mean if there's some 
possible irritation on a site theoretically I could just write a 
specific function to get rid of it. This mental setting works as a 
placebo on my web browsing experience so that the actual problems don't 
always even need  to be solved ... I hope I'm not losing all traditional 
programmers here in this approach :-)

> Not actually tried it myself, though did browse some of the code once
> or twice -- does some clever stuff.
> 
> Lots of other Python-implemented HTTP proxies, some of which are
> relevant (though AFAIK all less sophisticated than webcleaner), are
> listed on Alan Kennedy's nice page here:
> 
> http://xhaus.com/alan/python/proxies.html
> 
> 
> A surprising amount of diversity there.

At least now I know what general category seems to be nearest to my 
solution so thanks again for that. However my solution is not really 
doing anything like the programs on this page (although it is related to 
removing ads), instead it tries to modulate a copy of the page after 
it's been saved on disk. This removes all kinds of links and enables one 
to definitely and finally reshape the form the page will take. As such 
it is more concerned with the metaphysical image the page makes on the 
users brain and less with the actual content or the security aspects.

One thing I noticed though on that (nice!) Alan Kennedy page is that 
there was a script that was so small that it didn't even have a homepage 
but instead it just relied on a google groups post! I guess you can see 
that I liked that one :-)

My filter is even smaller. I've tried to make it smaller still by 
removing the batch file and using webbrowser.open(some cStringIO object) 
but that didn't work on windows.

regards,

A.