ReadWriteWeb

Greasemonkey is a powerful Firefox add-on that lets you change the appearance and functionality of almost any page on the web. Most people don't know how to write JavaScript, though, so we end up using the Greasemonkey scripts developed by other people who do. There are lots and lots of scripts that have been written and they are fun, useful and easy to run.

It's been downloaded 9 million times, but we believe many people still haven't heard of or taken the time to learn how to use Greasemonkey. So we recorded a 4-minute screencast showing you how to use the program and some things we like to do with it.

Greasemonkey is a powerful Firefox extension that allows users to change the layout and functionality of web pages. Every month hundreds of people write and release Greasemonkey "scripts" that anyone can add to their browser with a single click.

A good Greasemonkey script will change your daily use of the web in ways you can't imagine being without. In the post below we highlight our seven favorite scripts published in the last month and offer a quick screencast that will show you how to use Greasemonkey in less than 5 minutes.

According to the New York Times, a basic privacy measure that is often overlooked is the proper destruction of data on hard drives. An ongoing study by British Telecom says that most people don't realize that deleting a file doesn't actually remove the data from a computer.

In fact, the BT research found that only 33 percent of second hand hard drives had been completely wiped clean. To ensure your drive doesn't contain any personal data before you give it away or sell it, you need to reformat the hard drive or use digital shredding software if you want to completely eliminate all traces of data. In this post, we'll show you how.

Popular social bookmarking service Delicious says today is its 5th birthday. While this author was disappointing several years ago that it was Yahoo and not the Library of Congress that acquired the company, Delicious remains one of the most powerful and useful services on the web.

To mark its big day, we offer below two videos. The first an introduction to the tool for readers still unfamiliar and the second a screencast demonstrating just how easy and useful it is to make 5 changes to your Delicious experience. Those changes took us under 5 minutes.

Google's been the lone hold out among major search engines on RSS but the company quietly enabled feeds for web search results this week. The offering is pretty limited and frustrating, you have to go through Google Alerts to get an obscure RSS URL, but we offer a tutorial and some strategic advice in this post.

Web search RSS is useful for being alerted whenever search results for your keywords or link have changed; subscribing to at least a few searches will let you know when Google users are seeing something new in the first few pages of search results for your company name, for example.

It's all about the web apps these days, right? Everything important's in the clouds? Not so fast! Spend some time separated from your physical computer and you'll likely be reminded just how much time and care you've put into setting it up like you want it. Even in this era of web app hype, we still love a good piece of desktop software, don't we?

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we'll be honest with you - we love our computers. Not just the web. In that spirit we thought we'd offer readers some short video tours of the apps we use every day. You may discover some things you want to try out for yourself.

Digg for programming questions? Joel on Software and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror start letting users into their well built site.

The highly anticipated general release of StackOverflow, the social site for programming questions developed by rock star programmers Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, hasn't happened yet - but the doors are cracked open and many new users are streaming in this morning.

Yahoo's wildly popular photo sharing site Flickr is a lot of fun to use, but it really helps to take some time and learn how to use it well. We've recently engaged more seriously with Flickr and wanted to share some quick tips that we think will help you get more out of it, too.

Some people want to know how to do marketing on Flickr or use Flickr in nonprofit organizations, but in this post we're going to talk about ways you can enjoy the Flickr more for any purpose.

Greasemonkey is a powerful Firefox add-on that lets you change the appearance and functionality of almost any page on the web. Most people don't know how to write Javascript, though, so we end up using the Greasemonkey scripts developed by other people who do. There are lots and lots of scripts that have been written and they are fun, useful and easy to run.

It's been downloaded 9 million times, but we believe many people still haven't heard of or taken the time to learn how to use Greasemonkey. So we recorded a 4 minute screencast showing you how to use the program and some things we like to do with it.

Tagging content online is something that doesn't seem to have taken off the way some people expected it to.

Is it too complicated for widespread adoption? Is it too arbitrary to have the impact that formal taxonomies offer? Is it just too much work while you're zipping around the web? Who knows - what's important is that tagging web pages can still be very useful!

I stopped using social bookmarking tools for a big part of 2007 because saving things for my own future reference wasn't enough motivation to invest the time required. In the latter half of the year, though, I've seen what some other people are doing to make it worthwhile again. Here's five and a half ways you can fall in love with tagging URLs again.