Hacking Gmail

92 Part II — Getting Inside Gmail

Click Tools, and then Install User Script. Check that everything looks okay.

(Nothing red and scary? Good, carry on.) That’s it. You’re done.

FIGURE6-1: Firefox and Greasemonkey

The Userscripts

Now that you know how to install userscripts, you can start to use them.

Ordinarily, you wouldn’t have to type the code in, seeing as you just point your

browser to the site and let fly with the installation procedure, as detailed in the

preceding text, but you can learn a lot from looking at the code. For the next few

examples, therefore, you shall take a look. There are techniques to be learned, and

inspiration to be had, here.

Displaying Bloglines Within Gmail

Bloglines — shown in Figure 6-2 — is another great web-based application. It’s an

RSS reader — you can use it to keep track of hundreds of sites’ content by sub-

scribing to each of the sites’ feeds. Many users, myself included, keep close to a

hundred sites in their Bloglines subscription. Some have many more. Indeed, the

regular trawl of unread news items in Bloglines is close to as important as the reg-

ular checking of my Inbox.