TechThoughts

A while ago I stumbled on the great Firefox plugin called Greasemonkey. For a great introduction I recommend the hilarious presentation of Paul Fenwick at YouTube.

In short words: With a bit of knowledge of JavaScript everybody can alter the web to his / her taste: Remove ads that AdBlock (another good Firefox  addon) did not detect, remove unnecessary content, prefil form data, alter the style, etc. pp. The scripts that are changing the individual web-pages are called “userscripts”.
At userscripts.org, you find thousands of scripts that are easy to install (and de-install if you don’t like them).

For any web developer who likes to mash up content of different sites, Greasemonkey finally provides the platform to do that. Normally, the same origin policy for JavaScript disallows e.g. to fetch and display price info from other bookstores when you look at an item at Amazon. Or check automatically if there is an auction at ebay going on for that product. With Greasemonkey, you can program exactly this functionality…

While browsing around Greasefire can be used to detect scripts that might ease your pain and make web pages user-friendlier. After all, it’s your screen and now you can finally strip off anything that you do not want there and add additional functionality.

For a start, I recommend the online book of Mark Pilgrim “Dive into Greasemonkey“.  For up to date details, check out Greasespot, the home of Greasemonkey.

My favourites that can all be found at userscripts.org:

• GoogleTagCloudMaker
• LookItUp2
• GoogleMonkeyR
• Spiegel-Online_MultiColumn_PureContent (my own)

To demonstrate how different the content of a web page might look, this is Spiegel-Online without my script:

And now with my script installed, you don’t see any ads and use the full screen-width, displaying the content of the main pages in 2 columns and of articles in 2 or 3 columns. Most of the times, the article can be displayed in total - no need to scroll anymore: