Universal Historical Event on This Day Widget

WHAT IT DOES

This userscript brings history to life by displaying a widget in your BotGentz panel showing historical events, births, deaths, and holidays that occurred on today's date. It scans the current page for topics like politics, science, arts, sports, or history, and prioritizes events that match what you're reading. For example, if you're on a political news site, it highlights political events from this day in history. The widget shows a scrollable list of events with their year, description, and category, making it easy to discover what happened on this day across the centuries.

WHERE IT RUNS

The script works on every website you visit—news sites, blogs, educational pages, research portals, or any webpage. It runs entirely within your browser, reading only the visible text content of the current page to determine topic relevance. It does not track your browsing history, access other tabs, or send any data externally. Event data is stored locally within a built-in database, with no external API calls required.

HOW TO USE

After installation, open the panel by clicking the tool's icon in the BotGentz sidebar. Choose how many events to display (3, 5, 10, or all). Select which categories you want to see—Politics, Science, Arts, History, Sports, Society, and Discovery. The script automatically shows events on page load (you can toggle this off). Click "Show today's events" to refresh the widget at any time, or "Clear widget" to remove it. Events are sorted by relevance to the current page, with matching categories appearing first.

THE TECHNICAL MECHANISM

This script uses a multi-stage pipeline to deliver relevant historical content. First, it extracts page text and scans for topic keywords across seven categories using a curated dictionary of over 40 terms. Each category has specific keywords—for example, "Politics" includes "president", "election", "senate", "congress", and "vote". Second, it retrieves events from a built-in database keyed by month and day, containing over 30 historical events with year, description, and category. Third, it scores each event by category match (3 points) and keyword presence in the description (1 point), then sorts events by descending relevance score. Fourth, it formats the top events (up to the user's limit) and renders them in the panel with category color-coding. All processing is local, deterministic, and requires no external API calls, ensuring fast and private operation.

THE PANEL

The panel is draggable anywhere on the screen and remembers its position between sessions. It can be collapsed to a small floating bubble to minimize distraction, and expanded again with a single click. The panel's width can be adjusted, and pressing the Escape key closes it instantly. All settings—event limit, selected categories, and auto-show preference—are persisted locally using GM_setValue, so your preferences remain intact across page reloads and browser restarts.

PLEASE NOTE

This userscript requires the free BotGentz extension to function. The event database covers a selection of major historical events but is not exhaustive—it focuses on widely recognized events across politics, science, arts, history, sports, society, and discovery. The topic detection is keyword-based and may occasionally miss relevant page content or prioritize less relevant events. The script does not connect to external APIs or databases; all data is self-contained. No data from your browsing is stored or transmitted anywhere—all processing occurs entirely in your browser.