Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Greasemonkey Add-on for Firefox



Greasemonkey is an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox web browser that can help its users get more out of their online experience and the websites that they frequent. This add-on, in conjunction with user scripts, can alter websites to better suit your needs. I use this tool solely for printing pages from Google Books, but it can be used for much more. This online tool is accessible to anyone with the Mozilla Firefox or Opera web browsers.

Main Feature:
Greasemonkey's main use is altering websites and creating new functions that are helpful and convenient. One of its more popular user scripts is "Google Book Downloader" which allows the user to download and later print individual pages from Google books. This comes in extremely handy for college students that need to do research on little to no budget. Another popular user script, "GoogleMonkeyR," alters your Google search results but blocking the text ads, and displaying your results in columns so that you use more screen space and have to do less scrolling/searching.

Level of Difficulty:
Greasemonkey is very easy to use and simple to learn. Since Greasemonkey is a programming tool, people often fear that it will be difficult to use, but it is very user friendly. You can also go to online forums and learn more about Greasemonkey, and its uses outside of Google Books.

Potential Application:
Being a college student, I spend quite a deal of time on the internet researching various topics for my courses. This tool allows me to find more sources (with Google Books Downloader and other translation scripts) and sift through online searches faster. This ultimately saves me time and effort when doing school work and it could help many other students do the same.

Conclusion:
This tool is really a no-brainer for any and all students out there willing to give it a try. It will save you the headaches of looking at a computer screen for long hours while doing research or open up completely new features to websites you frequent often.

2 comments:

  1. Great tool! I work at a College in IT and I see students all the time in our labs trying to print off of google books with a lot of trouble. I will definitely test this out to use in our labs.

    Firefox has some really cool add ons. One of my favorite I was thinking about writing about for this assignment, but I have so many tools in mind, so I am glad I can use this comment section to talk about it is download helper. Download helper allows you to download video off of any website. Like Youtube. One of my favorite uses of this tool is to download new songs for free and put them on my Ipod.

    Another use, in the same vein, is to download live music off of Youtube. I am a music junkie and I used to make mix tapes in highschool. Everyone used to recored stuff off the radio for their mix tapes but I would take it to the next level by recording off the tv, live performances, from either concerts, or when a band would play live on say the Dave Letterman show. The best way to get that live performance on my ipod is through Youtube. The live performance has so much more energy.

    You can also use this tool to download to your computer documentaries off sites like google video. You never know when some video's might be taken down so its a great idea to download this tool to your computer.

    One interesting thing is that everytime download helper comes out with a new version Youtube updates their system to block download helper from downloading videos. Than download helper updates to overide Youtubes update. And the circular battle continues on and on.

    Ian

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  2. Hi Ian,

    Thanks for letting me know about all of those other tools that I could use that are similar to Greasemonkey. I am ashamed to say that I usually only begin using a new online/ digital tool hen I complain about not being able to do something that I want to (like print pages from Google Books) and my husband shows me a way to accomplish the task. I will have to try some of those other tools you mentioned...maybe one day soon I can be the one suggesting new technologies to him!

    -Jasmine

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