Well, this is probably not new technology to most but I just read about it the other evening.

http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/

For anyone that doesnt know what it does, it basically allows you to make any webpage look how you want it to look.  Lots of cool examples at http://dunck.us/collab/GreaseMonkeyUserScripts.

Anyways....  after reading over all this stuff I decided I wanted to make something.  The best thing I could think of was a minor annoyance I had with some websites not offering their own search feature.

So I figured every site should at least have a google search on it.  Now I just needed a decent way to show the form and I found http://www.xs4all.nl/~jlpoutre/BoT/Javascript/RSSpanel/rsspanel.html as a starting point of my project.  It offers a user draggable interface for a floating window.

After mangling his code and inserting some of my own, I came up with:


Couple key things added to his code.

1. It saves the location/visibility of the search box for the site you are currently visiting.
2. Has a user command to force the search box to show for the current site.
3. You can restore the default location of the search box via the user command menu.

So, now whenever I visit a site, I can always search the site directly from the webpage.  If the webpage has a form that contains the text "search", the search box will not display unless I force the search box to display.

If interested, you can install the Greasemonkey script at http://www.franciswscott.com/downloads/searchthissite.user.js

To sum up Greasemonkey..... very very nice idea!