The Lair

Well, it’s official now. Greasemonkey is stuck in a holding pattern for the moment while the developers figure out how to fix some potentially nasty security flaws.

The most recent release, 0.3.5, is a recommended upgrade for all users. It, however, contains no special GM_ functions. Essentially, Greasemonkey now functions as a custom user script injector. Without the special bits. Having said that, quite a few useful scripts still function properly. The question is, would you want to run them anyway ? Mark Pilgrim thinks otherwise, and says so, in fairly blunt language. I tend to agree with him, actually.

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From the introductory blurb, Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets a user add bits of DHTML to a page. I’ve waxed lyrical about Greasemonkey before, so I’m not going to go into how big a fan I am of this extension. I use it for a number of sites and it’s made my web experience far better; to say the very least. It sounds pretty innocuous to say that Greasemonkey injects pieces of DHTML into pages. Accurate, but also misleading in a sense that it gives no hint of the awesome power of this extension. When I first heard of Greasemonkey, the only thing I could think of was it’s utility for blocking advertising on select specific pages. Only, adblock fills that niche perfectly. I have Adblock, so I didn’t need Greasemonkey. Or so I thought. Fortunately, I was pushed into revisiting Greasemonkey by a friend and I discovered the script archive. And perhaps inevitably, I went from being a Greasemonkey skeptic to fanatic. In the matter of a few hours.

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This is truly a case of one title fitting many topics. Went for a BBQ last night, my first of the summer. Lots of grilled meat washed down with several interesting varieties of alcohol. Lots of suspiciously coloured rum concoctions, several beers (including a Caledonian Deuchars) and lots of meat (with the token breadroll or two) later, everyone retreated inside since it was getting a bit cold… and watched Southpark. Somewhat surprisingly, no one had ever heard of dousing the meat in beer before putting it on the grill though. And I was also dragged from the stone age and introduced to disposable BBQ grills. Sadly, this was pretty much the last outing before The Don leaves for a swank new job down south.

And on a completely different note (but staying with the greasy theme), I made some cosmetic changes to Greasepress. 0.21 (now with background colours) can be downloaded here. The older version is still available from here. I’ll have a few more fields (excerpt, keywords, draft advanced settings) hideable for the next release. Thereafter, I’ll do something about the main feature I’ve been asked for; making some sense of all the buttons (Save, Save and Continue Editing, Save as Draft blah blah) on the post UI.