Archive for GreaseMonkey tag
Firefox armed & primed
I’ve suggested many extensions and add-ons for Firefox over the last few months.
Here’s what my current install looks like – click to drill through to Flickr where you can hover over the various areas to see what’s-what.
[)amien
Google nuggets
As a frequent user of many of Google’s various services I continually find myself finding new tips and tricks for getting the most out of them. Here are a few to share;
GMail extra features
GMail are constantly introducing new features however the localised user-interfaces are often lagging behind and failing to expose the options. Set your language to “English (US)” to get access to the latest options.
Current options revealed include: Vacation responder, integration with Google Chat, Send mail as an alternative address (not just a reply-to) and web clips.
GMail compose with mailto:
Many web sites use the standard mailto: syntax to indicate email addresses. This works great for local mail applications such as Outlook and Thunderbird but fails miserably with web based mail providers.
Ideally web browsers would handle this but in the mean time a GreaseMonkey script is available called MailtoComposeInGMail that will internally rewrite any mailto: scripts to head over to your Compose option in GMail :)
If you don’t have GreaseMonkey already installed give it a shot. It effectively gives your machine the ability to customise the page just for you by running small scripts on your own computer.
GMail on your own domain name
Google have just opened registrations for getting the GMail interface, account management and mailing lists on your own domain name. This will no doubt mean MX records have to change and it will be interesting to know what SMTP/POP options they offer. Will let you know if I get in!
Google Analytics availability
If you, like me, have been itching to get into analytics but are still waiting for Google to re-open sign-ups then there is something you can do. Find somebody who has an account and get them to add your web site to their monitoring – they can monitor up to 10. Add the snippet to your site and wait.
They can then grant access to your reports and statistics information to your Google account so you can browse at your pleasure.
If you want to know when you visit a site being tracked by Analytics there’s yet another GreaseMonkey script to do the job.
Keep tabs on the Labs
Google’s engineers are always coming up with something new to play with, sometimes it will become a new product, sometimes a feature inside an existing one. Either way there’s usually a few interesting or useful nuggets to play with.
Google Suggest is very cool and the Site Flavoured Google Search is rather interesting.
Google Video
Currently one of the items in the labs but certainly soon to graduate with its selection of home videos, commercial TV shows and great clips. The commercial stuff is US-only at the moment and costs $1.99 a show but there is plenty of free amazing clips to enjoy.
There is also a GreaseMonkey script to hack round the US-only limitation by firing it through Google’s own translator… Let’s see how long that works for.
Google Maps
They’ve just improved the detail of their UK aerial data once again. It’s a shame Guernsey isn’t covered despite a local company having the information available but hidden away to those willing to pay. The route finding options are pretty useful and this is going to just get better and better.
The 3D real-time Windows application Google Earth is, well, incredible. I wonder how long before they add real-time weather simulation and predictive ones based on forecasts.
Google Search operators
This is pretty simple old stuff but you’d be amazed at how few people still seem to use/know about it.
To search for an exact phrase put quotes around it. For example “sql server” will get you pages about Microsoft’s SQL Server product while sql server without the quotes will return you pages with the word sql and the word server anywhere on the page. In this example, pages about Oracle, MySql, DB2 and every other SQL compatible database known to man.
The other option worth it’s weight in gold is the – operator. This looks for pages without a term or phrase. For example Leopard -Apple -OS will let you find results for Leopards as opposed to getting back lots of pages about the next version of Apple’s operating system.
Hope you found something useful,
GrinGod points out that Google have acquired MeasureMap which provides much more Blogger-friendly statistics than Google Analytics. Sign up for when they’re ready to roll!
[)amien
Firefox for power users, part 2
Here are a few more useful bits and pieces to improve you browsing experience if you’re a Firefox user.
GreaseMonkey
This great extension provides a framework that allows scripts to run against web pages from your own machine. The upshot of this is…
- Linkify turns anything that isn’t a hyper link but looks like it should be into one
- Butler removes advertisements from Google while providing second opinion search links to other engines
- Gmail: Smart-Delete button adds a useful missing button to the Gmail interface
- Google Maps: Mouse wheel zooming does what it says on the tin
- Google Suggest adds the still-in-beta search prompting feature to the main Google interface
There are many many more at GreaseMonkeyUserScripts.
CuteMenus
Put icons next to some menu items to bring the UI a bit more in line with Microsoft’s tools.
FlashGot
Download multiple files, images etc. from a single click.
Other browsers
Mac users may want to check out Camino which uses the Gecko rendering engine inside a native Cocoa application. It’s pretty fast and cool although it can’t use any of the Firefox plug-ins. Another alternative browser is OmniWeb which uses the Safari rendering engine but provides many more useful commands, options and facilities than Safari itself.
Microsoft fans will have to wait a little longer until the public Internet Explorer 7 betas turn up. We’ve been promised fixed PNG transparencies and improved CSS handling. In related news Bill Gates has been trying Firefox…
Postfix
Just a quck note to praise the free Windows blogging application Zoundry that allows WYSIWYG style editing. I’ve managed to use it to clean up some of the previous postings too. Now if only it had a spell checker and auto-pasted in the clipboard URL when you create a hyper link…
My Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 DVD’s arrived Saturday free of charge courtesy of Microsoft. I’ve just installed them alongside SQL Developer 2005 and will hopefully be posting some titbits soon. One heads up is to install IIS before VS2005. The VS2005 installer won’t warn you or error however the SQL 2005 installer will tell you it’s a prerequisite if you want Reporting Services. If you install IIS after VS2005 and before SQL 2005 you’ll receive an unidentified error for the Reporting Services installation.
[)amien