Squio.blog

Updates from April, 2009 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

• 

  Joe 19:25 on April 24, 2009 Permalink
  Tags: firefox ( 8 ), greasemonkey ( 4 ), ikea, user script   

  Old greasemonkey news 

  

  Greasemonkey logo

  Funny, just today I discovered a really old article by Computer Totaal (in Dutch) about a couple of Greasemonkey scripts: Websites aanpassen met Greasemonkey (August, 2007).

  Two of my greasemonkey scripts are discussed:

  1. Kilometerdeclaratie (Dutch only, outdated)
  2. Ikea Availability Check (as international as Ikea itself, recently updated)

  The first script used the route planner of a local provider to batch process distances between two addresses (based on Dutch Postal Codes), useful for mass reimbursements of work related trips by car. This script is no longer maintained, a mashup based on the Google geo API makes more sense now.

  The second script runs on every product detail page of the Ikea site.If your country or region has more than one ikea store, availability and stock data is automatically retrieved from each separate store and displayed in a table all at once.

  Most international Ikea sites are built on the very same content management platform, so it works for the Dutch, Russian and US sites equally well. Install it here: Ikea Availability Check.

  Nice discovery, nearly two years after…

  

  Popularity: 9%

  Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post
   
• 

  Joe 23:23 on March 5, 2009 Permalink
  Tags: greasemonkey ( 4 ), hashtag, Twitter ( 10 ), userscript   

  Enhance Twitter with Twitter Hash Tools 

  

  Image via CrunchBase

  Using Twitter in Firefox? Want to easily follow everything which is contributed to your favorite subject (#hashtag)? And want to know who is participating?

  Good, read on!

  First: what are hashtags?

  These are a convention to indicate that your tweet is about a certain subject or event, for example #sxsw is used for tweets about South by South West, and so on.

  Now there are a few services which make using this convention really useful:

  • Twitter Search – performs a live search on #hashtags and keywords
  • HashTweeps – finds all users who used a certain #hashtag

  So far so good, but Twitter does not link the hashtags in any way. Wouldn’t it be nice to have these services linked to the hashtag?

  Well, that is exactly what my Greasmonkey userscript does.

  It turns this line:

  @jake will I be seeing you at #sxsw this year?

  into this:

  @jake will I be seeing you at #sxsw [+] this year?

  So if you’re using Firefox, head over to Twitter Hash Tools on userscripts.org and hit the black install button at the right of the title bar.

  Make sure you have Greasemonkey installed first!

  

  Popularity: 11%

  Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post
   
• 

  Joe 08:32 on January 25, 2009 Permalink
  Tags: gmail, Google Apps ( 2 ), greasemonkey ( 4 ), security   

  Google apps secure connection 

  Update Feb 10: Google is listening to their critical users and takes their responsibility serious, it appears!

  Today I discovered that they did not only restore the “always use https” setting in gmail, but there is now a global switch on the Apps for your domain settings page as well. Ironically, the associated help page still tells you that this is a “premier edition only feature “.

  Now that is a big improvement, thank you Google!

  

  Apps for your domain: DomainSettings: always use SSL

  (More …)

  Popularity: 16%

  Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post
   
• 

  Joe 15:13 on August 20, 2007 Permalink
  Tags: ajax ( 10 ), fashionable web, Peter Laird, web builder   

  Greasemonkey, for the intranet! 

  Ever since I started using Greasemonkey (GM), I found more and more ways to improve aspects of public websites. What’s more, GM also proved to be invaluable for quick testing of mashups and other fashionable web 2.0 tricks.Using GM this way, it can be used as a tool for rapid prototyping of advanced user interfaces and Ajax enhancements as well. So a web builder could write a quick and dirty user script in order to prove the viability of a concept.That would be the natural border for user scripts within the corporate world, as far as I could imagine.Wrong! Peter Laird, Managing Architect for the WebLogic Portal engineering team at BEA, wrote a 5-part blog series about deploying Greasemonkey user scripts in the corporate environment.

  1. More Mashups: Using Greasemonkey to Weave New Features into Web Sites
  2. Building a Greasemonkey Mashup Tutorial
  3. Greasemonkey in the Enterprise: When is GM the Right Tool for IT?
  4. Beware of Greasemonkey’s Inverted Security Model
  5. Solving the Greasemonkey Script Versioning Problem

  The first two articles are a very nice and moderate technical introduction to Greasemonkey. The next installment starts to position GM as a valuable corporate intranet addition, with a checklist to find out if it is the right tool for your situation. The last two articles focus on the important security- and deployment issues, focused on the corporate situation again.I’m really curious whether corporate IT department heads will really be convinced by these articles. The checklist (part 3) lists a number of very frequent corporate / intranet annoyances where GM will help and the author’s background (BEA) is very trustworthy, so I give it a good chance.Definitely worth a read, even if you’re not a corporate IT head!

  greasemonkey firefox mashup corporate enterprise intranet

  [ratings]

  Popularity: 40%

  Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

  Peter Laird is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
  • 

    Peter Laird 18:51 on August 20, 2007 Permalink

    Thanks for the mention Johannes. I am also curious – the third blog entry lists at the bottom both proponents and detractors of GM in the enterprise. People are doing it, but the security and deployment issues cannot be ignored. BEA (my employer) focuses on server side solutions where we don’t have these issues.

    In the enterprise portal space, which is my focus, our customers are looking to integrate legacy web applications and packaged apps into a standardized and centralized infrastructure. They are looking to reduce costs by combating the sprawl of having thousands of web applications in their enterprise. Portals are a good solution to this problem.

    But to implement a portal solution, those legacy web applications must be integrated. There are a variety of approaches, including programmatic integration using Web Services, web clipping, WSRP, iframes, etc.

    I am interested in Greasemonkey because it is yet another tool to add to the bag of tricks when repurposing web applications. It likely wouldn’t be used in conjunction with an enterprise portal, but it is interesting all the same.

    Cheers,
    Peter

• 

  Joe 11:06 on April 12, 2007 Permalink
  Tags: API ( 8 ), early applications, geeky applications, Google ( 13 ), Jabber protocol ( 2 ), open IM protocol, protypical web   

  Twitter vs Jabber 

  As you might know, Twitter is the hype of last months. Everybody and their dog are updating their current activities like crazy.

  As a spin off, many secondary purposes are being created on top of the public Twitter API.

  This reminds me of the old days when Jabber was started as an open IM protocol. Lots of geeky applications sprung into life, like monitoring incoming email (headers), keeping an eye on your computer logs and such. Now the Jabber protocol (XMPP) is being used as the basis for a couple of IM platforms, like Google Talk. Many of those early applications are now official a XMPP extension. The platform has matured, but lost its appeal to the geeky crowd.

  Today, these kinds of applications are being built on Twitter by the dozens.
  Without any effort, I found lots and lots of them. I estimate these are less than 5% of all Twitter applications out there, so the list is really getting huge.

  • MoniTwitter (answering one simple question: What’s your website doing?)
  • TwitterIsWeird (displays pairs of twitter quotes in comic balloons)
  • PingTwitter (update Twitter when you publish a new blog post)
  • TwitterChat (2-way live shoutbox-twitter integration)
  • Twitterific (Mac OSX client application)

  And then we have the Twitterforum, an unofficial Twitter related discussions site, listing even more twitter related applications and sites.

  So does the Twitter API popularity have to do with its incredible simplicity? And its pluggability for the protypical web 2.0 platform (yes, it has a JSON interface)?

  I’m not sure, but I hacked togeter my own little contribution to this madness in just half an hour: Browse with Twitter, a Greasemonkey script for Firefox.

  Update your twitter.com status with a message “Browsing: [document.title]” whenever you load a web page.

  Fair warning: don’t install this script if you do value your privacy (or at least restrict it to the sites you explicitly want to show up on twitter).

  [ratings]
  

  twitter jabber im greasemonkey userscript xmpp

  Popularity: 51%

  Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post

  links for 2007-04-12 -- A Tempest of Thoughts is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
• 

  Joe 17:21 on August 29, 2006 Permalink
  Tags: ajax ( 10 )   

  Binary Ajax: EXIF Thumbnail Fetcher 

  Just a quick note: my first Binary Ajax project is ready for release (well, testing I mean).

  EXIF Thumbnail Fetcher is a Greasemonkey user script, which lets you retrieve the embedded thumbnail of a digital camera image over the ‘net, without downloading more than strictly needed.

  See my previous post for some more details. And, please test it and let me know your experiences!

  firefoxajaxXMLHttpRequestexifgreasemonkey

  Popularity: 24%

  Tweet This Delicious Reddit This Post Stumble This Post