Once upon a time, I wrote a little blurb on Piggy Bank and Solvent. Piggy Bank is a tool for maintaining RDF information taken from web pages, or data sources. Solvent is a tool which helps in the creation of RDF information through the use of Javascript “scrapers” designed for a given page or site. Piggy Bank is intended to facilitate the creation of informational mashups as written and controlled by a consumer of the information — i.e. you, the user.
Another interesting tool which I’ve been playing with lately is Greasemonkey — also see the Official Greasemonkey blog and Userscripts.org. Greasemonkey is intended to allow a user to customize the experience associated with a particular page, or website. It allows you to create additional content, or eliminate or modify existing content.
For example when looking at your bank statement, you might want to highlight the check number for written check transactions, and alter the background color of transactions greater the a given amount. All you have to do is write a little Javascript code, install the script, and each time you look at the bank statement it will be modified as you desire. It’s really interesting stuff, and I’ve been having a fun time using some scripts from others and creating some of my own.
One interesting script is the Yahoo Fantasy Sports player notes script as created by Glenn Carr. As uninteresting as some of you will find the sports aspect of this script, it’s a clever use of the Yahoo User Interface Library. This script pops up a div element with an animation while loading, then sets the content once the load is complete. The actual content is loaded from the page referred to by the link associated with the note icon. It’s a really nice feature which improves the usability of the Yahoo interface.
A simpler example would be some blogs which use high intensity white lettering on a very dark black background. Reading these sites actually produce artifacts in my vision, so I usually end up modifying the styles by hand to create a more “readable” version for myself. With Greasemonkey, it’s consistent and automatically performed by URL. So long blog created eye strain.
The sky’s the limit, so check out the extension and userscripts.org and make your web experience a little better today!
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