Miscellaneous Ramblings....

For those users of Google's ubiquitous Gmail client, you can now customize your mailbox with themes. It seems that my GreaseMonkey Better GMail2 plugin still works ok with the theme settings. (Current favorite is the Planets one, where the theme changes with your location).

A nice article on the 25 "must-have" Firefox extensions (the article also includes some nice GreaseMonkey scripts as well towards the bottom). Also, there is a link to a good MozillaZine article that lists various problems associated with some of the Firefox extensions, as well as any possible workarounds for the named issues.

I have found another cool Firefox Extension called X-Ray. This extension allows you to see the HTML page markup right on the webpage, without having to continously toggle back and forth between a browser window and the source view window.

Mozilla's RC 3 version of the Firefox Browser: 1.5 RC3 has been relased for testing. More themes (and more importantly, more extensions) have been retooled to work with Firefox 1.5 (so far GreaseMonkey, Close-Tab-On-Double-Click, ChromEdit and the Resize-Search-Bar are the only notable exceptions of the extensions that I heavily use). Some functions have been moved around with Firefox 1.5 (i.e. Updates are in a different place, as is the Live Bookmarks indicator). I have the version loaded up on my test computer and I am still putting it through the paces, but like what I see so far (being able to use the Scrollbar_Anywhere extension has greatly helped). Update (11/27/05): The version of Greasemonkey (0.6.3) in this location will actually work with the latest Firefox 1.5 RC3.

Thanks to my co-worker, Tim, I have been made aware of a very nice GreaseMonkey script called American Memory Fixer, by Simon Willison. It re-writes the American Memory from the Library of Congress web pages and makes them infinitely better. (FYI: The American Memory web pages contains hundreds of old photographs nicely broken out into sections, well, even nicer if you have the Simon's GreaseMonkey script installed ).

Note: For those who have short-term memory (like me ), here are the instructions for installing new GreaseMonkey scripts and here are the instructions for installing the GreaseMonkey plugin itself.

Yet another nice feature of Firefox is the ability to have Live Bookmarks, which is essentially RSS feeds that are embedded in your Bookmark Toolbar folder. This creates a nice drop down (bookmark) list of stories that can be read in Firefox (without having to start up an additional RSS reader). There are also options from the Bookmarks menu to refresh the Live Bookmark on demand. Here are my Live Bookmark links for: The BBC (UK): http://fxfeeds.mozilla.org/rss20.xml The Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/excerpts.rss Firefox Exts: https://addons.mozilla.org/rss/?application=firefox&list=newest RedHat: http://info.redhat.com/a/tBFLT82AUfRoFAt$g2FAM6Kxs6Q/rhmg8

I have been playing around with GreaseMonkey, a very cool Firefox Extension. This extension lets a user write quick Javascript(s) that can change the way a particular web page looks (i.e. removing annoying ads ). Also, one of my co-workers is trying to write a new GreaseMonkey script everyday, which he posts on his weblog. Quite a few user scripts can be found at the GreaseMonkey Script Repository, and some nice documentation on GreaseMonkey can be found at the DiveIntoGreaseMonkey website.