Fixing the Home Link in the Telem System (OpenU)

This post can be helpful for students of the Open University of Israel. As a student there, I found it very annoying that the link to the courses’ homepage in the Telem system is a JavaScript link. This prevents it from opening in a new tab, and thus require various workarounds to get back to the homepage in a different tab. So, a little while ago I wrote a little Greasemonkey script to fix it.

// telem.user.js
// version 0.1 
// 2008-01-01
// Copyright (c) 2008, Guy Rutenberg
// Released under the GPL license
// http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
//
// ==UserScript==
// @name          OpenU's Telem - Fix Home Button
// @namespace     http://www.guyrutenberg.org/
// @description   Fixes the home button link in the telem system of the OpenU.
// @include       http://maagar.openu.ac.il/opus/*
// ==/UserScript==


home = document.getElementById('home');
if (home) {
	re = /javascript:find_home_page\('(.*?)','(.*?)',/
	match = re.exec(home.href)
	home.href = 'http://telem.openu.ac.il/courses/'+match[2]+'/'+match[1]
}

This script changes the link to a regular non-JavaScript link. I’ve tested it for more than a month now, without finding any bugs. However if you find something, or have any suggestion, please comment.

Update: See A Greasemonkey Fix to the Top Menu in Sheilta (Open University), it has a fix for the top menu bar in the Sheilta system