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Peter Bhat Harkins
Greasemonkey Scripts: Gamasutra and Arlington Library
I signed up to userscripts to share a few of the GreaseMonkey scripts I’ve written. If you’re not familiar, GreaseMonkey is a way of reprogramming websites for your own convenience, and userscripts is where folks can share what they’ve done.
The script that’s useful to the widest audience (and that’s not saying much) helps out when I’m reading Gamasutra.com, which has some of the nicest writing on game design and implementation but breaks all of its articles up into 3-8 pages. I hate all that clicking and waiting, so I wrote a script to automatically pull up the one-page printer-friendly version of any article.
The other two are only useful if you use the Arlington county, VA public library system. They have a decent website (though it’s great when considered against other libraries), but it has a few parts that are annoying for home users because most of their users are on shared PCs inside the libraries. They both require a little hand-editing of your particulars, but they make it easier to manage your account and request holds.
I’m not happy with the \$x boilerplate I had to put at the top of all three. GreaseMonkey scripts can be very powerful, but it doesn’t seem like they have enough infrastructure around them to really make it easy to use that power. It’s odd that this hasn’t improved, given that GM has been around for a few years now, but maybe I’m just missing some resource. Anyone with more GM experience care to weigh in?