Greasemonkey: power to the people

[Erkki]

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/intermediation.html

I've heard about greasemonkey for a while now, but I've never bothered to find out what it is until now (same with bookmarklets actually). Well, still haven't actually tried to write a script, but it seems like Greasemonkey can be very powerful.

In short

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML ("user scripts") to any web page to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a web page's style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a web page's design or interaction.

[Erkki]

Behold Thumb forums lite. I can actually almost browse the forums this way, except it doesn't handle all the pages right yet:

[Erkki]

Haha, even better than I thought. This doesn't mess up most other sites, but cleans up any* vBulletin forum.

In case you are confused, notice that in the screenshot, the scrollbar is at the top -- only the forum list or thread list is displayed on the page. This currently messes up some things that depend on JavaScript/DHTML though (WYSIWIG editor for example), and only displays the first message of any thread, so it needs some work.

* probably almost

[Erkki]

http://overstimulate.com/articles/2005/04/24/greasemonkey-book-burro-find-cheap-books

[Erkki]

http://docs.g-blog.net/code/greasemonkey/hide_google_adsense.user.js

[Chris]

http://docs.g-blog.net/code/greasemonkey/hide_google_adsense.user.js

No, no! They are Idle T's sole source of revenue!

[Erkki]

No, no! They are Idle T's sole source of revenue!

They still get loaded. Just not displayed.

[Chris]

Yeah but clicking on them is what makes the money.

[Salka]

That's really shitty of somebody to make a Firefox extension like that, then.

Which ones do you make revenue from when people click them?

[Erkki]

I've never clicked the ads. Bwahahahaha. Ok, I did once.

[Chris]

I clicked on the ad to gain access to 1000 beautiful black singles. I hope you're happy.

Well if that's the ad you clicked you're the one who should be happy.

[Erkki]

Doesn't any of you see the potential of this? You can change any web site on the client side. Let me show you another crappy example:

I'd like to use more smilies here, so what do I do (see attachement).

Don't be discouraged by the fact that it's the most godawfully ugly smilie ever...

[Erkki]

The script can be downloaded here: http://lap.ee/erkki/misc/thumbsmile.user.js

(if you have Greasemonkey installed, right click and select 'Install User Script' on the link, then your smilie list for idle thumbs will look like that.) And if you replace the forums.idlethumbs.net in the URL with *, then it will probably work in any vBulletin forum that has similar HTML.

[Erkki]

Hehe... found even something cooler (kind of), thanx to http://www.waxy.org/links/. http://platypus.mozdev.org/

Platypus is a Firefox extension which lets you modify a Web page from your browser -- "What You See Is What You Get" -- and then save those changes as a Greasemonkey script so that they'll be repeated the next time you visit the page. Editing pages to suit your needs is dandy -- but making those changes "permanent" is the real payoff.

[n0wak]

Even better -- an extension that builds on top of Greasemonkey

http://platypus.mozdev.org/

Platypus is a Firefox extension which lets you modify a Web page from your browser -- "What You See Is What You Get" -- and then save those changes as a Greasemonkey script so that they'll be repeated the next time you visit the page. Editing pages to suit your needs is dandy -- but making those changes "permanent" is the real payoff.

Some of the things you can do with Platypus include:

* Remove parts of the page you don't wish to see.

* Move a part of the page to a different location.

* Change the style and format of page elements.

* Modify all the links on the page using a regular expression.

* Insert your own HTML code.

The link to install is kinda fucked, but here is the proper one

http://mozdev.elliptic.fr/platypus/platypus.xpi

I just used it to make this annoyingly not-big-enough text box to be bigger.

(it says undefined because I reloaded the thing to take a screenshot)