What is Now Showing? Now Showing is my attempt to shine a beacon into the vast dark wilderness of the web, hopefully guiding you to cool stuff you might not ordinarily find and that I think you might find useful (or just plain cool).
Today’s topics are the Firefox Extensions Greasemonkey and Stylish. These bad boy extensions allow you make the web your personal sandbox. With these extensions you can change the user interface and sometimes even functionality of any web page through the use of user scripts and user styles!
Seriously, CSS and JavaScript, the veritable chocolate and peanut butter of the web design world, together being used to make the web look and behave however I want? Time to breathe into a paper bag…
Greasemonkey allows users to manipulate the user interface and functionality of a web page with “User Scripts”. User scripts are JavaScript files loaded into the Greasemonkey extension platform and then applied at load of certain pages associated with specific domains specified by the user script. There is already a huge community and repository of user scripts at userscripts.org covering a vast array of cool stuff.
Honestly, I think Greasemonkey is one of the coolest things ever. Let’s say I don’t like how a page looks, or I want a page to do something that it originally wasn’t designed to do, well with a little “JavaScript Fu” and a “Greasemonkey Kata”–Magic Happens Baby! I have enforced my vision upon the web, that is right people tremble before my all mighty wrath… *ahem* sorry about that…
Greasemonkey puts power firmly in the hands of the users! Power to the people my fellow Monkeys!
What Greasemonkey is to JavaScript, Stylish is to CSS. Stylish really demonstrates the power of CSS, and man oh man are there ever a ton of cool user styles at userstyles.org! In some cases you can replaces some Greasemonkey scripts with Stylish styles, so, so, so cool!
I have to admit that I am still full-on geeking out about Stylish and I have been using this for quite some time now! I love the ability to make the web look how I think it should (must… resist… maniacal… laughter…)!
Stylish, you make my heart sing…
Hope I have shed some light on some new toys for you today. Oh, and don’t think I am neglecting you IE or MAC folks out there, I have something to show you next time…
Enjoy!
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