Hi everyone. Today I am talking about fixing the web. Some of you might know this already. This is fundamentally talked about taste. Now back in the 1970’s if you are Weight Watchers you will hoped that you like to Red Cabbage and Jello because that were on the recommended slides of what you should be eating.
But that is not my taste. My taste is different. So when I was in primary school I did not think very much of this particular painting instead I thought this painting was much better which I drew. Likewise I did not think very much of this document and I thought that a much better document was this one here which I wrote myself. And by the time I got to High School, by the time I got to High School things were not much better.
So one of the great things about being an open source is we can fix things and one of great things about having physical objects is we can fix things as well. We have been doing a lot of hardware hacking this week. So if you got a program you do not like or a public space you do not like you can fix it to your taste that is fantastic. But can we do that with the web? Well, we can. This is cool plugin called Greasemonkey.
Greasemonkey, let us see run Javascript on any page you want. Javascript, put to your right, which is fantastic. So let us go and fix a webpage and make it better. Now let me get three minutes so I cannot do this quiet life. Which webpage are we going to suck, are we going to fix one that sucks. Which webpage sucks the most? That is right Myspace. I struggle to find any redeeming features on Myspace but some of my friends had there Blogs there. So if I go to Myspace I get something which looks like this, of which I carry that almost nothing. To fix Myspace I am going to use a little bit of Javascript.
What this lets you do is it pass an ID it tells it to go away. Now, how do you find those Element IDs? Well you can look inside the HTML source but if they did not look at HTML source of Myspace it is pretty scary. So I am going to use another tool called FireBug which is another Firefox plugin. Yes. With some of you who have used it, it is awesome. FireBug got a speck mode, you wave over something on the top right there and you can see then the bottom base the HTML nicely formatted the Element which is responsible. So you can use that Element.
So once you found all those Elements you can then remove all those things you do not like. And if you go to Myspace without this plugin, it looks like this. if you turn on Greasemonkey and install the code of origin, it looks like that. And if you have already logged in, it looks like that. So you can do anything you want with the Greasemonkey and FireBug. But most people are lazy, they do not really write code themselves. So if you want to have something cool like a plugin which lets you see all the different book prices when you go to Amazon, you can to go UserScript.org which is a huge repository, you can see there Myspace for unsocial, factious bastards, that one is mine. More than 14 thousand scripts on that site. So everyone go fix the web. Thank you.
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