The IE8 extension does something similar as the Firefox Operator plugin, but all of it is implemented in Javascript (using the Jquery library).  In fact, all the extension does, is make the browser insert 2 lines of javascript into the source code of any page it visits to perform the magic.  Jon Udell made a demo page with the javascript already included so you can check its effect with any browser without installing anything (more at Jon’s posting on Oomph).

Inserting lines of javascript automatically in any page?  That sounds like a Greasemonkey job, doesn’t it?  Strangely enough, a search for Oomph and Greasemonkey didn’t result in anything useful.  So that’s why I put this simple Greasemonkey userscript online² that does for Firefox what the IE extension does: alerting you for hCalendar and hCard microformats and making it easy to download or export them.  Install it and head over to Jon Udell’s second version of his demo page that doesn’t have the script yet, to check whether the effect is identical.

Note: as mentioned on the userscript’s page, Microsoft can theoretically follow your clickstream if you install the script (by logging http referer headers on load requests for the script). If you are not comfortable with that, host the Javascript libraries on your own server and replace the path “http://visitmix.com/labs/oomph/1.0/client/” by the new location.

1. although several people have argued that the webslices that came with IE8, are in fact a somewhat different implementation of the hAtom microformat
2. it is in fact based on a similar del.icio.us script I discussed in a posting 2 years ago

How to generate a limitless number of email aliases

There are two common ways to do this:

1. If you have your own domain: use a catchall – this a mailbox that will “catch all” of the email addressed to @yourdomain.com, so any email address at the domain that doesn’t belong to another mailbox will end up in this default mailbox. Create email addresses like some-site-you-are-at.com@yourdomain.com.
2. Use the “+” trick in Gmail: Gmail.com has the weird feature that youraccount+whatever@gmail.com ends up at youraccount@gmail.com (the plus is really a “+”). Create email addresses like youraccountname+some-site-you-are-at.com@gmail.com.

Greasemonkey userscripts to generate url-specific aliases with one keystroke

1. Email Address Generator for your domain: inserts an email address like “the-site-you-are-at.com@yourdomain.com” when your press “F9″. You’re prompted for your own domain name the first time you use the script. Install the script.
2. Email Address Generator for Gmail: inserts an email address like “youraccountname+the-site-you-are-at.com@gmail.com” when your press “F9″. You’re prompted for your Gmail account name (NOT your password ;-) !) the first time you use the script. Install the script.

You need the Firefox and Greasemonkey to install these scripts – check out this introduction on Greasemonkey if you had not heard of this great Firefox extension yet.

So what will it bring you?

Some examples of how this habit has helped me so far:

1. Filter newsletters, notifications, updates (BACN) into folders or labels (or the trash bin) even if sender and subject change
2. Find out from which marketing stunt some publisher got your mail address
3. See which startup had its database end up somewhere it doesn’t belong
4. Be able to prove that a trainee copied the customer database to start his own web shop (happened to a Belgian non-profit organisation)
5. Block comment notifications when a blog post you commented at succumbs to comment spam (sometimes blog posts do not offer comment feeds but just email notification – I even go as far as making an email alias per posting then, e.g. by inserting a date: 20071009.somedomain@mydomain.com)
6. Protect my mailbox: I was once stupid enough to include a contact email address in a php script, that got included in the popular Joomla software at some point in time, and got downloaded to hundreds of (virus-infected) computers… In the end, I had to ask my hosting provider to have the mails for this alias sent to the system trash immediately because I was flooded with virus mails…

Some more tips and caveats

1. Don’t forget that even if you were BCC-ed in an email, you can find out via which alias it was sent to you by having a look at the email headers.
2. The “Gmail trick” won’t work everywhere – some sites will refuse an email with “+” sign (or will refuse any Gmail address).
3. The catchall solution is more powerful than the Gmail trick for yet another reason – you can create an actual account called somedomain.com@yourdomain.com:
   1. It will block these mails even from entering your Catch-all mailbox (make it bounce when the mailbox is full, or have the mails sent to trash… such as in the virus mails example)
   2. And it works also when you’re in BCC (see first remark in this list)
4. Forget about a catch-all solution when you do not have an adequate spam filter (from SpamHuntress). I forward my Catch-all mail to Gmail, which has great spam filtering. Leave a comment if you have other solutions that work for you.
5. With email addresses constructed this way, spoofing a sender is dead easy of course. As far as I know, it hasn’t ever happened to me (why would anyone do that?) but if you’re careful as Michael Boyd Clark is, you might use a something-cryptographic-of-the-domainname-you-are-at@yourdomain.com instead of domain-you-are-at@yourdomain.com.
   I don’t use it because you’d need to calculate the generated address every time you want to query for it (with the “from:” operator in Gmail e.g.).   And if you – like Michael does – use a hash (from which you cannot derive the originating domain name) you’d need to do some bookkeeping to make sure who’s address this was. Nevertheless, I might consider to rewrite the script so that it produces secret-hash-of-domainname.domainname@mydomain.com (making it both recognizable and impossible to make up).

Have more tips or ideas? Share them in the comments…

(The quality of the above screencast might depend on your bandwidth. All links mentioned are in the following text as well.)

1. Get Greasemonkey.
   If you haven’t heard of this Firefox extension (or still don’t see why you’d even need to switch to Firefox!) check out a previous posting on Greasemonkey
2. Install the Del.icio.us MP3 userscript.
   Like lots of userscripts, this is a “Greasemonkification” of an already existing javascript, in this case the “Del.icio.us Playtagger“, that lets webmasters insert an inline Flash player automatically for every linked MP3 url:
   
3. The result: on any webpage with linked MP3 links, the power of Greasemonkey makes the inline player appear, exactly like in the playtagger examples. Now you can listen to the audio right away, and decide whether you want to have it on your MP3 player for off-line listening. If so, click the “tag this” button and save the MP3 link to del.icio.us like you would do with any other link – use e.g. the tag “tolisten” as a reminder (analogous to the often-used tags “toread” or “toprint” in del.icio.us :-) ).
4. Now filter your del.icio.us account with the “magic” tag “system:filetype:mp3″:
   
   Not only you have the list of all your mp3 files, the corresponding rss link http://del.icio.us/rss/<username>/system:filetype:mp3 under the icon will be a full-fledged podcast (= with mp3 enclosures) you can feed to your podcatcher (=podcasting client).
   You do not need to assign this “system” tag yourself in order to be able to filter on it – Del.icio.us infers them from the file extension – did you know del.icio.us has similar tags for video, images and documents as well?
5. By refining your selection with your own tags (such as “tolisten”, or “jazz”, or “interview”, whatever), you create your own shareable playlists.

Update October 23d:

• Jon Udell’s referral to the screencast reminded me of another trick to collect a series of loose MP3 links on a page in one swoop: see Jon’s screencast on how to use the Webjay page (and bookmarklet) for this
• I replaced the self-hosted flv video file with a version hosted by Revver. I have been comparing video sharing sites to host screencasts, and I’ll post my evaluations soon.

[tags]del.icio.us, mp3, podcasting, greasemonkey, lifehack, audio, screencast, syndication, inlineflashplayer, playtagger, inline+flash+player[/tags]

What it is

Basically, it’s “a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of javascript ( = user scripts) to any webpage to change it’s behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a webpage’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect.” (from the Greasemonkey site).

What does it mean

Javascript is incredibly powerful, and more and more sites are designed in such a way that they’re easily “scriptable”. By adding “user scripts” to sites, you can change and add functionality.

How does it work?

Let’s illustrate with an example: the “Google annotate” user script that enhances Google search results with information on available rss feeds and del.icio.us tags on that search result.

1: With Greasemonkey installed, you can simply right-click on a link to a userscript (= a .js file):

2: Modify some options (e.g. adding your local google site):

3 … and this is the result: search results are enhanced with available rss feeds, link to del.icio.us entries and a tags link showing the used del.icio.us tags when clicked on:

Some other examples

Enough inspiration at this GreaseMonkey User Scripts Directory:

• Changing layout:
  • Title Scrubber: removes “Welcome”, “Welcome to”, etc. from title bars.
  • Site skinner: Adds a skin link down the bottom of every page which lets you add custom css to the page (uses cookies to auto load css).
  • Expand TextArea: allows you to resize textareas.
• Modifying behaviour:
  • Hide Adsense: Hides Google Adsense IFrames
  • Flickr: Degradr: Replaces flickr’s flash-embedded images with actual image files
• Integrating functionality of several sites
  • Amazon/Melvyl: Check UC Libraries Given a link to Amazon, check Univ. of California’s libraries for availability
  • Del.icio.us/NewsGator: DeliciousGator: Add del.icio.us post links to News Gator Online.
  • Amazon Linky Inserts three icon links under book titles, one to a price comparison site and two to libraries.

Issues

You might have heard about the row on the Googe autolink feature, reminiscent of the Microsoft Smart tags discussion almost 4 years ago. Now grass roots developers have the possibility to do the same with User scripts: automagically changing branding, removing ads, inserting links to other sites… both for specific domains or as general browser behaviour. As a kind of “Sue me if you dare” statement Mark Pilgrim designed Butler: a user script that removes ads from Google search results, and adds links to competitors.
The implications for online business models are huge, and we might see some nasty battles coming up – as well as new services made available via these “scripts in the middle”.

Disruptive?

In itself, it doesn’t seem a spectacularly new technology:

• bookmarklets have been arround for some time, and already led to amazing applications, such as when you combine Google Maps with other data sources, such as users’ pictures and annotations.
• nothing new either about the concept of “Web annotation”, think of the WikiAlong Firefox plugin, letting you annotate webpages (on the public WikiAlong Wiki or an a private, company or project group wiki).

The really new thing with Greasemonkey is the ease scripts can be written (javascript has been around for almost 10 years), made available (simply put a file online) installed (right-click), and propagated (think of a user script showing the available user scripts for the site you’re browsing!!). Without any doubt, zillions of these scriptlets will be hacked together and spread like wildfire, extending and bending existing functionality. (see for example Greasemonkey for Google Maps)

A new architecture for the web?

Jon Udell asked whether there could be such a thing as a general architecture of intermediation, a way of devising applications and their connections in such a way that an intermediary layer can adapt their behaviour and combine their data and functionality with that of other applications, even your own private applications. According to Simon Willison, Greasemonkey and its “scripts in the middle” could be a very light-weight implementation of such an architecture. To be continued…

Oh BTW: Greasemonkey for Internet Explorer is underway :-)

Update April 4: Jon Udell’s yesterday screencast explains all of this so much better!