The Manicou Report

Back by popular demand, it’s Tech Tuesday. Yes, I know this is Thursday, however, Tuesday wasn’t anywhere near long enough. And it’s not by “popular” demand. Only one person demanded it, but you never know, she could be popular, right? But anyway, think of these tech tips as the gifts that keep on giving.

I suggest that you download and install a extension for your Firefox browser called Greasemonkey. This extension on it’s own does nothing, but it allows you to add a number of beneficial user scripts to your web pages. All Greasemonkey does is open a portal where you can add tiny bits of script to your Firefox browser so that web pages behave as you want them to.

After you install Greasemonkey, you can find your scripts at Userscripts.org. To install, click on the gray box to the right that says “Install this script”. A window will pop up to confirm so all you have to do is click “Install”. Left-clicking enables or disables Greasemonkey and right-clicking allows you to enable or disable individual scripts (among other things). I’ll tell you about four of my favourite Greasemonkey scripts now.

The first is a script called Facebook Remove App Requests. Most of us are addicted to Facebook - admit it. Many of us have friends who like to install (and then invite you to install) every single Facebook application that comes their way. I can’t stand that. Sorry I don’t want to pirate, a werewolf or a vampire. I don’t want to know what kind of fruit I am or what my stripper name is. Geez. I don’t know about you, but everyday I get tonnes of these invites.

So I installed this application that simply creates a button to the left of the “Confirm Requests” page which allows me to decline/ignore all requests with one click. Clicking “Ignore all Apps” will open up a confirmation window. Click “OK” and watch them all die. Make sure you confirm or decline any friend requests first because it’s possible that this application could deny those as well.

Next is another script for Facebook users called No Facebook Applications. As mentioned before there are some who like to load up their Facebook profiles with every single application that comes their way. All you want to do is find their stupid wall yet you have to read about their “Friends” comparisons and search through a mile-long Fun Wall. Not fun. Think of this as a Facebook decluttifyer. During the load the script will hide all user-installed applications from their profile making everything simple and uncluttered.

This last one will help a lot of you, particularly you blog commenters. I’ve had the experience of filling in a text area on a web page only to have the page to crap out. The Textarea Backup keeps a record of the text that you entered on a particularly page (for example the comment box on a blog post) and will keep it there till you enter new text. So if the page craps out when you are trying to send the information, you can come back to find everything as you filled it in. This may create privacy issues on shared computers since the text stays there till it’s replaced. Keep that in mind when you use this.

Still don’t have Mozilla Firefox? Get it here: