Grease the Gears

How many of you want to enhance the web-site you are visiting? To make it look better for your usage, To remove stuff from the page, To add stuff to the page… You have probably heard/using GreaseMonkey to grant yourself your wish. (For others who haven’t heard about it, GreaseMonkey is a Firefox extension which can run your own javascript on the page with access to the entire dom – which 'can' let you do pretty much what you want.)

With the availability of Google Gears, web-applications can go offline(ofcource only the ones that support Gears)… Is that all? No, you can get more… All you have to do is to Grease the Gears for smoother and better experience.

Here is an example.
Now, Google Reader works with Gears and is available offline... well, not the entire application is offline... The Search feature is gone, when you switch to offline-mode...

Offline-Reader = Online-Reader MINUS Search-feature

Here is a greasemonkey script that enables you to search your data in offline mode. Of course this search may not be as intelligent as Google Search, but it is something.

Offline-Reader PLUS GreaseMonkey ~ Online-Reader

But, this is only the beginning. What synergy can be produced by mixing Google Gears and GreaseMonkey? GreaseMonkey provides a hook to write ‘your’ own javascript code on top of the application, and Google Gears provides a Database to store ‘your’ data (‘your’ means ‘Of you, the Internet user’). A SDK in your browser to customize any website!

You can keep track of information you want as a history in the cache and retrieve them when you visit that site again. What you want to store – is left to your necessity & imagination!!!

If you find any interesting use, do let me know.

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Footnote:

• GearsMonkey is a Google project to enable you inject Gears code into applications that do not support Gears! No activities yet, but keep an eye on it.
• http://userscripts.org/ has a repository of GreaseMonkey userscripts which you can use/contribute
• GreaseSpot.net is the GreaseMonkey blog site
• If you want to write your own userscripts, you might also need WebDeveloper and FireBug extenstions for FireFox. Check them out even if you dont want to.
• ... and yeah, I know the title is cool.