Tales of a Librarian

Hey, just installed a greasemonkey userscript for my blog that allows me to add technorati tags to the end of my blog, which link straight to a search for that term on the site! Quite cool, no? I shall have to find time to go over all my old posts and modify them to include this, as it probably could be quite useful as evidence of my application of keywords/subject headings etc., well, in a setting that is not work anyways. So here goes…

Technorati Tags: cataloguing, greasemonkey, userscripts, firefox, tags, tagging, extensions, keywords

p.s. if you want the script for your own blog (works with wordpress and blogsome) then you can download it here.

Just noticed that Lorcan Dempsey posted a similar blog entry about using greasemonkey userscripts to combine amazon with the library - in this instance, the University of Huddersfield library. When browsing books, users will be informed of whether the book is currently available at the university library, and a link takes you straight to the appropriate page of the catalogue. Amazing. I’ll not repeat the post again, but urge you to have a look yourself. And if you want to try it out, the script can be found here.

Hi folks, been playing around with Greasemonkey a bit, and I have to admit that it is quite good fun!!! Greasemonkey is “a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (”user scripts”) to any web page to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a web page’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a web page’s design or interaction” (From mozdev.org)

So far I have found the best ones to be scripts for removing those annoying adverts from my hotmail account (at last, I’m free!!!) and one for allowing me to automatically subscribe to RSS feeds through Newsgator.

I couldn’t help but notice, however, that some of the scripts allow users to check the availability of books on Amazon.com in their local library. How useful is that? At present, the scripts are all for American libraries, but this is something that could be fairly easily adapted to be of use to people in the UK (well, i think so anyways… just don’t ask me to write it!). Wonder what Amazon thinks of it all…

A post in the UKeiG weblog discusses a report released by XiTi, which has compiled usage figures for the firefox browser across different European countries, and averages across different continents. It finds that Finland has the highest percent of users using the firefox browser, with 38.39% preferring it to other browsers. The United Kingdom on the other hand, has a measly 11%, which after having used the browser for a whole year myself and being completely in love with it, is something of a disappointment.

Europe has the highest use (20.11%), with Australia behind (18.6%) then America (15.8%).

Figures from the visitors to the Information Research journal shows that 27.1% use the firefox browser, which they state is a big jump, so I guess there is still hope!! I think that it is probably an awareness issue, so if you haven’t already, click on the button in the right-hand margin and get yourself a brilliant new browser. And if you’re a member of UKeiG, you can find fact sheets about the advantage of the browser over others here.