Greasemonkeys!
Today, while waiting for my incredibly slow script to finish running, I came across a very interesting Firefox extension: Greasemonkey.
Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (“user scripts”) to any web page to change its behavior.
One really interesting use of these Greasemonkey scripts is Stephen Fernandez’s Geotagging Flickr with Google Maps and Greasemonkey . His two greasemonkey scripts allow users to geotag flickr images quickly and efficiently by injecting new links into both the flickr and multimap interfaces. On the flickr side, the user clicks the ‘Add Geotags’ button and is then automatically redirected to multimap.com. Once the user is at multimap.com they can geocode their location. When multimap has found the location it will present the user with a link that says ‘Add GeoTags to your flickr image’. A couple more clicks and the user is back at their flickr image and with a bit of luck, the geotags should have been inserted successfully.
I’m thinking this type of script could be very useful for my TravelBlog application. Getting the lat long coordinates of the user’s location was always going to be a problem as I have yet to find a free world-wide geocoding web service to user. Instead I was assuming users would have to actually browse to a site such as multimap.com or maporama.com, geocode their location and then manually copy and paste the lat long coords into the blog entry. Not so nice.
So the next step is to get the TravelBlog up to speed so it is actually more like a weblog than it currently is. Then onto the Greasemonkey scripts!