Hackszine.com: Greasemonkey Archives

Archive: Greasemonkey

December 2, 2007

Annotate the web with ShiftSpace

ShiftSpace is an open source platform that uses Greasemonkey to place an API layer over the web. When you have the plugin installed, ShiftSpace connects back to a central server to locate "shifts" that other users have left behind for the URL you are viewing.

By pressing shift+space on your keyboard, you get a list of these "shifts", which are essentially a layer of user-contributed annotations that are layered on top of the web page you are viewing. The current tools allow you to leave post-it notes, swap images, highlight text and even reformat the html of the underlying page. To add a shift to any web page, you just hold the shift key down and a little menu appears.

Right now, the shifts you see appear to be global. In the near future, it's supposed to have the ability to filter shifts based on friend groups, friends of friends, or just you own shifts. This could make it a convenient way to take notes on pages that you view, alone or collaboratively.

The bigger deal is that the underlying API is open source, and the tools provided are just examples of what you might be able to build. The server-side is written in PHP using the SQLLite library, so it should run on just about any web server environment. If you want to hack a meta-web application of your own, you can just download the source and start coding. Just make sure to tell us about it when you've got something to show.

ShiftSpace: An Open Source layer above any webpage - Link
ShiftSpace documentation - Link

November 7, 2007

Hacking Hackszine: GreaseMonkey category viewer

Rich Burridge writes:

This is a GreaseMonkey script that works with your website. If enabled, it will replace the contents of your main page with a list of categories and under each category heading, will be a list of all your posts to that category.
Very handy to see everything you've created in
the past, if you aren't exactly sure what you are
looking for.

Note that this is doing the equivalent of loading
over 120 more web pages, so be patient with it. It
takes a while to build up the new web page.

This script basically takes a deep crawl through every category on Hackszine and returns the titles. I just ran it and, wow, I didn't realize how much hack info we've managed to collect here in the past year. What's cool (and a bit embarrassing), is that I can pretty quickly see what topics I've fawned over a little too much (Mac, iPhone) and categories that are in need of a little more attention (AJAX, Astronomy, Transportation, Science, Energy, World, Wireless). If you have any great hacks for the latter group, please send them in immediately before I get accused of turning this into an Apple blog.

If you maintain a blog, you should take a crack at adapting this script to your own site. It might be a helpful tool for looking back over your post history or even generating a quick category-based sitemap that you can save as a static html file.

GreaseMonkey Script For Expanding All Hackszine Categories - Link [Thanks, Rich]

April 24, 2007

Run (some) Greasemonkey scripts on Internet Explorer

Jon Udell mentions a great add-on for Internet Explorer, Reify Software's Turnabout, which gives you the ability to run some Greasemonkey scripts in Internet Explorer:

...it comes in two versions: basic and advanced. If you download the basic version it only runs a small set of scripts that the Reify folks have blessed. You have to download the advanced version in order to be able to install other scripts, such as my LibraryLookup script.
I realize that relatively few IE users are likely to run Turnabout, just as relatively few Firefox users run Greasemonkey. But a small fraction of IE's large share is still a healthy number, and I'd like to do what I can to encourage interesting, important, and of course safe and responsible uses of this technology.

Jon spent some time modifying one of his scripts to work under Turnabout, and has written up some notes for anyone who wants to do the same - Link

Related:

Lifehacker Code: Better Gmail (Firefox extension) - Link
Greasemonkey Hacks - Link
Reify Turnabout - Link

March 6, 2007

Three Solid Gmail Productivity Tips

Gmail Productivity

Matt Cutts shares three solid Gmail productivity tips to help keep your inbox under control, including keeping mailing lists out of there (using filters), prioritizing messages (using Greasemonkey and persistent searches), and excluding messages from certain accounts (using filters and labels).

February 10, 2007

LinkBack: Trackbacks Everywhere and Without the Spam

The concept of trackbacks and bidirectional linking has always been really intruiging to me, but it's such a difficult problem to solve, even if you ignore the spam issue... and that's awfully hard to ignore.

Ted Nelson coined the term Hypertext over 30 years ago, and articulated its principles, most of which have been ignored in the triumph of the Web. One of the principle elements of Nelson's vision that was left out of the web is the inherent bidirectionality of hyperlinks. This just means that a link from A to B should be visible, and traversable, from B to A as well. A simple idea, but suprisingly difficult to implement if you start with the sort of document-centric model that the WWW uses.

The problem is that bidirectional linking requires a certain level of cooperation between referencers and referencees. You can't force every publisher of every document to maintain a trackback-style referencing policy or system. Fortunately, however, you can expect that someone will be in the business of crawling and indexing the web, and the topic of references, as any fan of Pagerank will tell you, falls squarely into the search domain.

LinkBack is a Firefox/Greasemonkey plugin that queries Yahoo web services as your browse the web, displaying incoming links for the web pages that you visit. It's pretty much like using the "link:" qualifier in a Google search, except that it does this automatically for you for every page that you visit, showing the results in a semi-transparent floating div over the document you are viewing.

Of course, there are privacy issues with sending all your browsing information to Yahoo, and the results are only as good as the search engine is capable, but it's a step in the right direction, and for the most part, it works. -Link.

January 26, 2007

Personalize Your Flickr Replies

Personalized Flickr Reply
Serious Flickr users who regularly respond to multiple comments on their photos might be looking for something a little more personal and functional than the de facto @username: convention for specific replies. For this specialized task, Flickr user doc18's Flickr Buddy Icon Reply Greasemonkey script might be just what such hardcore Flickerers are looking for:

It adds name_reply and icon_reply links at each of the comments under your photo. When you click on the link, the buddy icon html code will be added into the Add your comment box, where you can show nicely who your replies are directed at.

The enhancement does more than just drop in a thumbnail of the user's buddy icon into your post. The HTML for the inserted icon provides all the contextual features of the user's full profile icon, including links to the user's profile, photos, tags, sets, archives, and favorites:

Flickr Reply with Profile

This is just one of many Greasemonkey scripts I now use regularly with Flickr, so much so that I end up taking them for granted as features of the service, forgetting that they're add-ons. Check out the Flickr Hacks group for tons of great user scripts and other Flickr-specific hacks.

Related:

October 24, 2006

Foreword to Greasemonkey Hacks

In his foreword to Mark Pilgrim's Greasemonkey Hacks , Aaron Boodman (creator and lead developer of Greasemonkey), speaks of the pride he takes in the association of the word hacks with his creation:

It has been occasionally noted that Greasemonkey is a hacker's tool. I take some pride in that, since I come from a family of relentless hackers.

He continues with a touching account of his own family of hackers, going all the way back to the need to hack that's been so central to the evolution of our species (humans, that is, not just hackers, which, contrary to popular opinion, does not constitute a separate species).

Finally, he ends with a sort of call to arms that Greasemonkey promises:

The next time you find yourself frustrated by a broken website, you won't have to live with it. You'll have the tools and knowledge to fix it yourself.

I'd like to think this spirit is central to all Hacks books and to every issue of MAKE (and, dare I say it, the evolution of our species).