Customize your web with Platypus

The past few days I’ve found myself grumbling about why a couple of websites weren’t showing information in the way I wanted to see it. After some digging around, I discovered that the information I wanted was buried in the code of both of these pages, in one way or another, but wasn’t visible from the browser!

So, in a fit of frustration, I decided I was going to teach myself how to write a Greasemonkey script. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows users to write scripts which alter the look, feel, and functionality of a web page within the browser. Many scripts are freely shared at http://www.userscripts.org. I quickly figured out that I’d probably need more than a day to fully grasp the intricacies of JavaScript needed to compose a Greasemonkey script — probably taking more time than I had at the moment.

Just as I was about to throw in the towel, I discovered another extention, Platypus , which provides a great deal of hand-holding in the scripting process. It provides a graphical interface within the browser, allowing you to select elements of the page with your mouse, and quickly add, remove, or modify content on the page. It certainly is more limited than a full Greasemonkey script, but it sure is quick and easy. For example, yesterday, in about 5 minutes, I built a script that will display a book’s ISBN directly on the Amazon search results screen. For those of us who do a lot of Amazon searching by title, you know how much time this saves not having to click into each record and scroll down to the ISBN field for each title!

Platypus does have a learning curve, but it is nowhere near as steep as Greasemonkey — I consider it to be the gateway for future hard-core scripting! ;)