Your Own Construction
posted in Hurray for Geekdom |Hard hats required; the whole web is under construction. Usually, I say this because every single website out there is in a state of flux; any “good” site will be updated regularily. However, this time it’s because of something fascinating; greasemonkey. No, that’s not a perjorative, it’s an extension to firefox that allows the user, aka, you to write scripts (in JavaScript) that manipulate the data the server is handing you.
Want to link to your library from amazon.com? This doesn’t change the amazon site for everyone- just you, when you’re using that browser. There are a lot of greasemonkey scripts already available, and I’m sure there will be more.
Like most things where I can see both sides of an equation, I’m not quite sure where I stand on this. On one hand, it’s totally cool because I can see the use for a lot of neat things; automatically finding addresses in a page, and generating a google map. On the other hand, I write (in general) server programming for that sort of thing, and if I want a google map there, I’ll put it there thank you very much. Maybe I don’t want it there for a specific reason.
I suppose, it’s your browser experience, you have every right to customize it. But I’ll be interested in seeing the outcome of the first lawsuit over the use of this scripty-goodness.
