Rewriting the Web with Greasemonkey, Rails and WEBrick #
Here’s a bountiful wellspring of hot chowdery ideas. Simon Willison is using a local web server (Ruby’s own WEBrick and Rails) and some JavaScript to annotate the web and share his additions as a feed. Now think about how this could be used to hack the web at will:
This architecture could be easily adapted to add private bookmarks to del.icio.us – or to add any number of cool features to any number of other sites. Here’s another example: Google’s Desktop Search integrates results from your local drive with the search results page on Google. Using greasemonkey and a local web server tied in to OS X Tiger’s Spotlight indexer, you could add this functionality to any search site you wanted to. Just be sure to lock down the web server to only serve requests from localhost, to avoid sharing search results for your data with anyone on the network who can see your machine.
Lots of great GreaseMonkey scripts over on the wiki. I wonder if I can use this stuff to get comments (optionally) showing up in the RSS feed.
phil
Hmmm… certainly food for thought.
I was just thinking that perhaps this could be used in conjunction with gmail somehow. Like maybe somehow making your gmail account look like a blog, or maybe storing content in your gmail account – if your ISP is stingy about how much space they give you for web content, etc. maybe using gmail like that could be an interesting solution.
Is the key here Greasemonkey or is it really Rails and Webrick? Couldn’t you just get your gmail content and then munge it somehow with Ruby and redisplay it as a blog on a webrick server (well, I suppose you could do the same with Apache, etc. as well but Webrick is so easy to use)? You could just go through your gmail account and display all of the messages which had a certain subject line format on the blog page. Doable?
Comments are closed for this entry.