Tag Archives: web-development

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An interesting use of Greasemonkey – Troubleshooting other people’s sites

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Detriot-Superior and Center Street Bridge I’ve played around with Firefox’s Greasemonkey add-on here and there but never really delved into it until recently.  I found most of the common uses for it to be either too specific to someone else’s use habits or already covered by other extensions.  For example, there are probably a million ad blocking scripts out there, but I already have Adblock.

I’ve grown to appreciate Greasemonkey a lot more since I learned that you can make AJAX calls in scripts – now we can do some real damage.  But this post is not about that, it’s about a totally different use case that I hadn’t thought of before.

If you’re a web developer with any friends or family you’ve probably heard this one before:

“Something’s wrong with my web site, can you take a look?”

Often, though, you won’t have access to a dev server, database, or even a copy of the server-side code.  All you can see is the HTML and Javascript source and the HTTP transactions going back and forth.

Greasemonkey can’t rewrite PHP code on someone else’s server but it does make it really, really easy for you to alter forms, delete and change cookie values, and patch and debug Javascript on the site you’re looking at, without changing any other variables.

This can be really, really useful in some situations.  So now it’s officially added to my volunteer/web-developer/brother-in-law toolbelt.

XHTML 2 vs HTML 5 and the href Attribute

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Spider web window - common motif in the Winchester HouseI wrote a little earlier about what I was looking forward to in HTML 5.  I haven’t had a chance to really collect my thoughts about XHTML 2 vs HTML 5, to be honest I’d be happy to see progress on both fronts.  I do have to say I lost interest in XHTML 2 early on when it seemed they were throwing some baby out with the bathwater.  HTML is not the cleanest, most elegant language but the ease of picking it up is part of why the web grew so quickly.  Even if that has forced browsers to cope with millions of pages of clunky, broken HTML.

Eric Meyer has at least one point in XHTML 2’s favor – the ability to add and href attribute to anything, making it a link.  In addition to making the <a> tag jealous, this would let you do some pretty cool stuff like turn an entire table row into a link in a dynamic data reporting web app without a lot of Javascript or duplicated tags.

By the way Eric is a fellow member of the Cleveland Web Standards Association and a great speaker.  If you get a chance to see a talk by him you should really check it out.

A Scary, but Fascinating Idea – Javascript and CSS hack to see where your users have been

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Invasion of Segway infantry!

I just ran across this post on Aza Raskin’s blog about a technique used to cut down the number of social bookmarking links displayed to users.  I’m sure you’ve seen them–the 20 or so colorful buttons that have popped up at the bottom of every blog post on the web, for Digg, Del.icio.us and similar sites.  On my blog they are hidden behind the ShareThis Widget but Raskin had a better idea – why not just display the ones each user actually uses?

Impossible?  Not so fast – think about what happens when you visit a site.  After your visit any links to the site will change, usually from blue to purple.  We can put up links to each social bookmarking site and then use Javascript and CSS to check to see if each link has been visited.  If so, display the button, and if not, hide it.

This is a very cool way to manage buttons but the technique has wider privacy implications.  I could, for example, put links to…  questionable sites, and then use some Ajax to collect that information about users.  If I had other information about you (say you logged into my site or otherwise gave me an email address) I could link it together and build a database.

On the other hand, it’s not like I can grab your entire browsing history or follow you around after you leave my site – I have to specifically create a link and check it for every site I want to know about.  And unlike your browser history this info is cleared every time you close your browser.  So it’s not spyware or anything as intrusive as, say, the Alexa toolbar.

I can think of a bunch of cool ways to apply this technique, but I’m not sharing until I implement one.  Feel free to post any ideas (or misgivings) in the comments below.