User Scripts

AltaLink

Included Sites: altavista.com (all subdomains)
Browsers: Firefox, Opera.

AltaLink cleans up all the snooping redirections that are normally part of the AltaVista search engine results.

What usually happens when you click on an AltaVista link is that you are sent (invisibly) to a server under yahoo.com (parent company of AltaVista/Overture) which then redirects you to the page you wanted. If you have a Yahoo ID then this has just told them who you are and exactly what you clicked on. Okay, not a big issue since you've probably tried your search on Yahoo before this. But such snooping is at least underhand, IMHO. In fact the image results actually conceal the yahoo.com redirects by rewriting the status line to make it appear as though you are going straight to the page - I'm not even certain if that's legal considering the information gathering potential.

AltaLink will fix that. It replaces the yahoo.com redirects with links to the actual sites. It also reformats the links leading to AltaVista's function pages (Web, Images, more info, etc) to remove similar inter-domain tattling.

(v0.8 - 20th June 2006)

Bad Guy Sticker

Included Sites: amazon.* (all subdomains)
Browsers: Firefox, Opera.

When visiting a product page at Amazon this script will detect the 'label', 'studio' or 'publisher' field from the product's data and test it against a list of MPAA, RIAA, BPI and FACT members. If it finds a match, even a partial one, it will display a warning 'sticker' to let you know that money spent on this item will be used by the Bad Guys to harm your rights.

When you give these idiots money they use it sue people based on nothing but a screen-cap of a p2p IP list, to sue artists who are simply and naturally building on existing culture, to lobby for the extension of copyrights so they can tighten their hold on your culture, to take away your right to control your own property by persuading hardware manufacturers to sell you broken machines, to limit the development of new technologies because it threatens their outmoded business models, to force other countries to submit to their so-called Intellectual Property laws regardless of their own positions, and to find new ways to prevent you from participating in your own culture.

You may think it unlikely that something as simple as not buying certain products could have any impact on this lamentable situation. But regardless of the outcome the question you really need to ask yourself is, can you, in good conscience, continue to fund these activities? Even for those who will continue to buy these products it is important to understand the consequences of doing so.

I'm making the raw, unsorted bad guy lists used in the script available just in case anyone finds another use for them: RIAA, MPAA, BPI, FACT. And here is the Perl script used to translate these lists into JavaScript.

(v0.9.2 - 5th October 2006)

Member Lists Updated: 17th September 2006

Good Will Press

Included Sites: www.illwillpress.com
Browsers: Firefox, Opera.

Good Will Press does two things. It replaces all the annoying popup window links at illwillpress.com with regular links allowing you to decide for yourself whether you want to open the link in the same window, a new window or a new tab. Also any pages containing embedded objects will have links added at the top-right leading to the source files (hover over the link to see the url). This means you can right click on the link and select Save Link... to download the swf file to your hard disk. Enjoy the rantings of Foamy the Greasemonkey way.

(v0.5 - 1st Dec 2005)

Little Island Client

Included Sites: *
Browsers: Firefox.

This is the latest version of the Little Island Client user script which allows access to the Little Island universal commenting system. Learn more at the project home page.

Operahoo

Included Sites: http://images.search.yahoo.com/*
Browsers: Opera.

This script is a usability fix for Yahoo's image search results pages when viewed using the Opera browser. The pages currently appear with the result details on the right of the thumbnail images, stretching the layout until it is too wide for most displays. Operahoo simply adds some inline CSS to the mark-up, forcing the details to appear below the images and allowing the layout to shrink. Because of the way user scripts are inserted it is necessary for all the images on the page to finish loading before the correction is made.

(v1.0 - 2nd October 2006)

QuikiWiki

Included Sites: * (all)
Excluded Sites: https://* (to prevent accidentally sending private data to wiki servers)
Browsers: Firefox, Opera.

This script allows you to select text on a web page and, with just one click, use it to check for an article on Wikipedia. When you select a section of text a small pop-up appears at the top right of the window with a quote of the selection and image links to Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikiquote. This probably only saves five or six clicks but somehow this seems a lot less troublesome. The pop-up also provides alternative links that will open the results in a new window or tab (depending on your browser settings).

The script tests for selected text in two ways: it waits passively for a mouseUp event (as when you release the mouse button after a selection drag) and also actively tests for selections once every two seconds. This allows you to make a rough selection with a mouse drag and then extent the selection area with Shift+Arrow Keys and then just wait a moment for the quote to update. Once the mouse is over the pop-up the selected text is locked so that miss-clicks won't leave you having to make the selection again.

The script automatically truncates long selections and ignores very long selections so selecting all the text on a page won't cause problems. To close the pop-up just deselect the text by clicking once anywhere else on the page.

(v1.0 - 5th October 2006)