Ian Oxley

I quite like the toolbar at the top of GMail. You know, the one with links to Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Docs, et al. But I’m not that keen on having to scroll right back to the top of the page each time I need access to it. So, I created a simple Greasemonkey script for Google Chrome to apply fixed positioning to the toolbar. That way it always stays at the top of your screen

(Firefox users: I did create a user stylesheet that achieves the same effect
recently. However, that relies on the @-moz-document domain(mail.google.com) to restrict the CSS to GMail and Google seems to send different HTML to Firefox than it sends to Chrome).

You can fork a copy of the script from GitHub: https://github.com/ianoxley/gmailtoolbar

Or alternatively download it from here: gmailtoolbar.user.js

Recently I made a few amends to some Greasemonkey scripts I wrote a while back and, since I’ve been using git quite a bit recently, it made sense to me to move my Greasemonkey scripts onto GitHub.

So I did And here they are:

• google-search-shortcut
• open-selected-links
• stackoverflow-tag-cloud
• straight-to-reader

I hadn’t done any monkeying around with Greasemonkey for a while until the other day when I came up with this script: http://github.com/ianoxley/open-selected-links

Any links that are present in the selected text will be opened on the mouseup event, except for the Cached and Similar links you get in Google search results.

If you’ve got and suggestions for improvements, let me know in the comments

UPDATE

The script has been updated so that you now have to press the Ctrl or Cmd key while selecting the text, in the same way that you would Ctrl / Cmd + click to open a link in a new tab.

Stack Overflow is great and I’m a big fan of the site. However, I’m not such a big fan of their tags page:

Because the tags are ordered solely by popularity and not alphabetically, I find it a bit awkward trying to find a tag I am interested in e.g. if you want to find JavaScript it could be located anywhere in the list.

Admittedly there is a search function to help you find tags but I wanted to be able to scan the list more easily and pick out the tags that interest me most. So, to scratch my own itch, I created a Greasemonkey script to transform the current tags page into a tag cloud:

Because the tags are in alphabetical order with their font size weighted according to popularity, I find it much easier to find tags I am interested in.

Try it out for yourself and see what you think:

• Install stackoverflow-tag-cloud.user.js
• Install via userscripts.org

And if you have any suggestions for improvements, please leave a comment.