Hasta La Gadget!

Sep 05

CyberNotes: Greasemonkey Scripts That Save You Time

Posted in: CyberNotes, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on September 05, 2006 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

A few months ago Max got me into Greasemonkey and I didn’t realize the power that it had until I really started to search for scripts. For those unfamiliar with Greasemonkey it is an extension for Firefox that will let you add functionality to Web sites. You can do just about anything from changing the way eBay looks all the way to using Google Maps in Flickr. So those things are great, but how about we look for some real time savers…(the last one is my favorite)

–Digg Mirrors (Download)–
Many of us love to browse Digg looking for interesting articles but sometimes it is frustrating when the site you are trying to view won’t load. Most people will wait for someone to post a cached link in the comments but there is no need to wait when you can get a Greasemonkey script to do it for you.

As seen in the screenshot the script will add three buttons at the end of the article’s title: DuggMirror, Coral Cache, and Google Cache. That way you are bound to find out what all the hype is about.

–Greased Lightbox (Download)–
This script is a must for anyone that views images all of the time. When using Greased Lightbox it will open images on top of the current page instead of opening a new page.

It is also very heavily geared towards Google Image searches, Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace, and deviantART. You will find it the most useful on those sites because it will pop-up with the image instead of taking you to another site to see it. For example, if you do a Google Image Search and click on one of the thumbnails you will see the full-size version without being taken to another page. You can also zoom in and out using the buttons that I point to in the screenshot or you can move on to the next picture without even going back to the search results. This script is very useful!

–Auto Login (Download)–
Auto Login Firefox Sometimes it is a pain to hit the submit button each time Firefox fills in your password. Wouldn’t it be great if it just did that automatically? It can!

The Auto Login script is great because it will click on the submit button for you as long as Firefox has already filled in your username and password. If your password doesn’t get filled in automatically then the script will never run…it’s that simple.

You can recognize when the script is automatically pressing the button because it will place a purple border around it. The downside is that it will automatically try to log you into the sites that place a default username and password into the text boxes. I see this happen frequently in forums but you can disable Greasemonkey in a single click so it isn’t really a big deal.

–Allow Password Remembering (Download)–
I have written about this feature before just not as a Greasemonkey script. There are some sites, such as Yahoo Mail, that try to prevent you from storing your password in your Web browser. This is done by adding autocomplete=”off” to the form’s HTML code. With the autocomplete turned off the browser will not even prompt you to remember the password, but this Greasemonkey script will remove that from the code.

Not every site uses this technique to prevent passwords from being remembered but I’m sure you’ll find a few that it works for. Sorry, there wasn’t really a screenshot that I could take of this one.

–Inline Google Player (Download)–
Every now and then I come across a song that I want to listen to but I hate having to open my media player just to listen to hear it. A few weeks ago Google started to let users listen to MP3 files in their email without ever having to leave their Inbox. It was a great feature and I started to wish that other sites did this as well.

Soon after that Lifehacker put together this script which utilizes the Google MP3 player. Anytime it finds that filetype it will show you the play button along with the timeline. I don’t use this very often but it is nice to have when I do need it.

–My Favorite…GMail Conversation Window (Download)–
Out of all of the scripts that I have mentioned this is the entire reason that I now use Greasemonkey. The other scripts are useful but this is something I use several times throughout the day.

GMail conversation window allows you to right-click on an email in your GMail account and it will pop-up with the entire message. Using this prevents me from having to navigate away from the page I’m currently viewing which saves me a ton of time! To make things even easier you will find some useful links at the top of the message that lets you close the window, archive the message, mark it as unread, or immediately send it to the trash. Ahh, it even works with those really long messages because if it is too big to fit on your screen it will give you a scroll bar.

Honestly I find it so useful that I think Google should implement a similar feature so that I can use this anywhere I go. If you use Greasemonkey only for this script it will be well worth it. What a great way to end the list.