Taist: upgrade your internet

We invite web developers, especially with the experience of creating / using userscripts, to become beta testers of the tai.st project - a new way to improve websites by users.

What it is?

Website improvements by users - with the help of browser extensions and userscripts - are becoming increasingly popular, including more and more often discussed on Habré . But although new improvements are constantly being created, they are used very poorly and by a very small number of people - it is too inconvenient to use them, it is difficult to create and promote.
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Therefore, we decided to make Taist - a technology that solves the key problems of user improvements and allows us to get the most out of both developers of improvements and their users.

Below I will talk about existing problems, about how we are going to solve them, and what it will give.

Existing problems

(examples are given for Google Chrome, for other browsers there are similar extensions, but I didn’t use them myself - search according to the words userscripts, userstyles)

There are three main technologies for improving sites by users:

• custom scripts - userscripts.org site and clients like Blank Canvas Script Handler and TamperMonkey
• custom styles - userstyles.org and stylebot.me sites
• browser extensions , tailored to specific sites

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

• Improvements need to be specifically looked for — you need to specifically think “what are the improvements for this site?”, Go to each of the styles / scripts / extensions repository sites, search there and try what’s found. Rarely, someone does this, unless there is a serious problem, so the improvements created reach only a small part of their users.
  
  
• Improvements need to be specially promoted - since the user himself rarely finds the necessary improvement, the authors have to write about him on external resources, where only a small part of potential users are represented.
  
  
• It is difficult to write your own improvement - you need to learn additional syntax and API of user scripts and extensions, browsers support them differently - this especially makes it difficult to create the first improvements.

Result : the use of, and even more so, the creation of most of the improvements is available only to the most advanced web developers (only custom styles are relatively “close to the people”).

Our solution

The essence of all changes is to adapt the technology, honed under the geeks, to a wider range of users.

Specific changes:

• Propose improvements automatically — when visiting a site, recommend suitable, most popular improvements automatically. This will solve both the user's problem of choice of improvements, and the problem of the author to promote improvement to the masses. Now this cannot be done: the platform sites and the improvements themselves are simply not adapted to this interaction, and the majority of users are anonymous - it is impossible to identify even the most popular improvements, not to mention more “smart” recommendations.
  
  
• Simplify the creation of improvements - so that the improvement can be created, being on the site page, simple JavaScript and CSS, without having to learn additional APIs.

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

Join now!

If you are interested in trying out “userscripts on steroids” and helping us as beta users, join the beta test - we will release the first beta version on May 13th (we already created and tested the closed alpha version). We promise active interaction and feedback feedback - it is on their basis that we will create a new, convenient tool.