Michael Anthony Heap

Well, this post was supposed to be on Google Reader, and some of the cool things you can do with it. However in my effort to be more organised I kept on top of my feeds, meaning I have nothing to show.

As we can't go an entire weekend without a post, it's time to introduce you all to possibly my favourite Firefox extension of all time, Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey allows you to run little bits of javascript known as user scripts on specified websites. They have many uses, ranging from making sure you're on a secure connection when checking your emails, to redesigning how a website looks and acts (Infact, I use one to alter how my Google Reader looks, but more on that later).

Once you've installed the script, there will be a little monkey head in the bottom right of your screen. This is the greasemonkey, and it controls all your installed scripts. You can right click it and enable/disable scripts for the current page, or click manage to bring up a screen that shows all your currently installed scripts.

As I said, there are lots of different scripts, so how do you find them? Thankfully, the guys over at userscripts.org wondered the same thing, and set up a repository of scripts. It's searchable, and you can sort by number of downloads, which makes it easy to find exactly what you need. However, you don't want to be checking userscripts every time you find a new site you're going to frequent.

This is where Greasefire comes in. It saves an index of the userscripts database locally, and highlights the greasemonkey icon with a background if there are scripts available for the current page.When you right click the monkey head, you get another option, that says (x) Scripts Available. If you click this, it shows a list of all scripts available for that page, and lets you install them from that window.

Remember not every Greasemonkey script is on userscripts, and that Google is a valuable tool for finding specific scripts to solve a problem you have.

Now, how different people use Greasemonkey is upto them. I personally started using it to improve the interface of a game I used to play. Then once the script maintainer left, I took it upon myself to carry on development, and learnt javascript as I went. Now, I tend to use scripts other people have written, but occasionally I hack my way around sites using them (the most recent was to autorefresh the Leeds Festival tickets purchase page until it loaded).

And that basically, is Greasemonkey. In future, I'm intending to take some simple scripts and dissect them to try and give people an introduction to coding Greasemonkey scripts.Until then, check out Dive Into Greasemonkey if you're interested. It's a little outdated, but a valuable resource nonetheless.

Do you use Greasemonkey? Are there any scripts you just couldn't live without? Have you got any scripts you've wrote yourself? Let us know in the comments.

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