Adblock Plus, Greasemonkey For Firefox 3 Beta 5

I love Adblock Plus – I refuse to use the internet without it. I also quite enjoy Greasemonkey. Unfortunately, neither is yet compatible with the new Firefox 3b5. I got tired of waiting so I took measures into my own hands.

What Central Authentication Can Do For You

Imagine the following scenario: you are the operator of a small website that has a private user’s area which requires visitors to login to view. A few months later, you want to add a gallery application which also requires users to login and, finally, you want users to be able to edit a community wiki, but not allow non-members to make changes.

Automatically Require Dijit Widgets

Recently I have been playing with the dojox.dtl: the javascript port of the Django templating engine. So far I am quite impressed, not only is it fast and full featured, but by writing a wrapper class it is easy to make it behave like server side templating systems: you specify a template and pass it an object and it will render that object according to the template rules.

Cookie Injection Using Greasemonkey

There are several Firefox plugins which allow the user to manipulate their browser cookies. However, most of these plugins force the user to manipulate cookies individually. This can become tedious if the user is simply “importing” cookies from, say, a wireshark dump.

The CookieInjector userscript simplifies this process, by allowing the user to copy-paste the cookie portion of the dump and have the cookies from the dump automatically created on the currently viewed web page.

SFU ULife Calendar Refactor

This weekend I was working on some SFU community sites and I decided it would be nice to display the SFU ULife calendar on one website in particular. SFU ULife is a community building initiative which aims to increase the visibility of the community and events at SFU in a pledge to increase student involvement and awareness. Read more about ULife’s goals Here.

Dojo: Meet Google Book Search

For those of you who read about the re-launching of the SFU Bookswap website (http://sfubookswap.com), you may remember that one of the new features was the integration of the Google Books database.

In this entry I am going to talk about how I integrated the Google Book Search functionality into my existing Dojo framework.

SFU Bookswap v2.0

I recently re-launched the SFU Bookswap website at a new address: http://sfubookswap.com. It is still reachable from the old address of http://books.sfu-rha.ca. The new address will provide fast, dedicated hosting which is a step up from the less than reliable system that was previously used.

The new version of the Bookswap website also sports some new features and improved functionality. The process for making an offer has changed slightly: now the seller of the book is immediately notified of offers via email, rather than when the posting expires. This is intended to provide sellers with up-to-date information on people interested in their postings so they can make informed decisions if they are considering selling their book via another means.

Greasemonkey And Dojo Integration

Dojo (http://dojotoolkit.org/) is a wonderful javascript toolkit which just reached version 1.0 at the beginning of November. I have been watching and developing with Dojo for a couple years now and I can’t tell you how excited I am to have passed the version 1 milestone

Greasemonkey (http://www.greasespot.net/) is a handy Firefox extension which allows the injection of javascript (called userscripts) into the webpage currently being viewed. This allows for the customization of the look and feel of a website: improving the user interface or adding additional functionality.

In this example, we are going to use greasemonkey and Dojo to display a dialog widget on an arbitrary website.