Greasemonkey Hawaii State Library Lookup

John Udell wrote a Greasemonkey script called LibraryLookup several years ago that I modified to work with the University Of Hawaii's library system. LibraryLookup works in the background when you visit pages on Amazon.com and puts up an indicator if your local library has the book you are browsing.

Later, I attempted to get this script to work with the Hawaii State Public Library System (HSPLS). I quickly found out that the HSPLS was using an ipac system (good! that is on the supported list) but for some reason they have turned off searching by ISBN (are you kidding me!?). I sent someone in their IT staff an email at the time and they responded by saying it was something they would be turning back on soon. A couple years later I checked and still no ISBN search. I sent another email and the response was something about upgrading to a different catalog system. John's script worked by looking for the ISBN, and while I could see ways to get it to work by Title and Author, I never took the time to actually adapt it to do so - until now. My script does an initial search by "Author Keywords" and "Title Keywords" and then looks at the content of the resulting page for an ISBN match. Here is the code:



So to use the code download it to your computer and name it something like hspls.user.js. Then, if you have Greasemonkey installed and open the file with your browser, it should ask you if you want to install the script. After installing the script, whenever you visit a book's page on amazon.com the script will check the HSPLS's site to determine if they have the book. When it finishes this lookup it will append a link to the Amazon page right after the book's title. The link will contain either the text HSPLS(Yes) or HSPLS(No:#). In the case of Yes, an exact ISBN match was found. In the case of No, the ISBN was not found and the # will contain the number of books that were found given the search term that was submitted. The following screen shot shows an example where the lookup failed but indicated 6 possible fuzzy matches:



Ok, that was a bad example! One of the fuzzy matches is the actual book under a different ISBN, oh well. Did I just spend 2 hours of my day off polishing up that script? Yes, I guess I did.

Firefox Greasemonkey Outlook Web Access Extension Part III

Other posts on OWAX: [ Part I | Part II ]

I have reverse engineered the way Microsoft Outlook Web Access uses Ajax to mark records read / unread under Internet Exploder and have added similar functionality to my Firefox Greasemonkey Outlook Web Access Extensions.

The code, also shown below, can be downloaded here.

Firefox Greasemonkey Outlook Web Access Extension Part II

Other posts on OWAX: [ Part I | Part III ]

Small addition to my Greasemonkey Outlook Web Access Extension -- now the enter key submits the search on the find names form.


Code shown below and as a download here.

Firefox Greasemonkey Outlook Web Access Extension Part I

Other posts on OWAX: [ Part II | Part III ]

Stuck using Outlook Web Access to access your email via Firefox? Painful isn't it? Microsoft has seen fit to make sure many features are not available if you aren't using Internet Exploder. Take, for example, the case where your mailbox fills up and you need to clean out your trash -- hmmmm, no way to "Select All" so that you can at least delete messages a little faster. Thankfully Greasmonkey makes writing site specific extensions fairly painless. Here is my Outlook Web Access with my extension installed...look mom, Select All!



Grab the extension here. Source code shown below: