The Web Belongs to Everyone: Make It Yours. « The Technology Column

1May/10Off

The Web Belongs to Everyone: Make It Yours.

Thankfully, the web does not belong to anyone, it is free and open for anyone to give and take as they please (as much as some governments of the world do not like that, even democratic ones). It is the perfect demonstration of the free sharing and exchange of information and ideas. There are probably millions of web servers out there all actively feeding the information that is requested of it. This is known as A Good Thing.

However, what if you always thought that a website should implement a specific feature, or you would like some small part changed, what would you do? You might just silently hope that it happens anyway, you might email the webmaster and suggest the wanted change and see if they follow up to it, or you can use a tool available to Firefox users to make it all happen yourself. The extension is called Greasemonkey and it can help make the web yours and allow you to take back control of the content on your screen from a loaded website.

You can remove all the advertising you like (and really, if a website cannot survive without showing you ads, it does not deserve to be feeding its content onto the open web -ooh, I'm gonna get some backlash over that one), change how things appear and behave and also add little things, if you know where to get the scripts from or how to make them yourself.

Some favourites include removing ads from Google searches, forcing Google to search for pages indexed or re-indexed within a specific time, save search time by splitting your Google search results into two columns on the screen, remove the Google page redirection from search results, return traffic back to the source by removing the Google cached link, modify and change features on Facebook, enhance Farmville, put irritating users on your ignore list on popular forum programs and more.

Take control of your user experience and make it how you want it right now. Check out the Greasemonkey userscripts index and find some scripts that will help you make the web the way you want it. Have fun.