Now officially living in my browser

Firefox screenshot, from left to right: Vertical tabs, courtesy of Vertigo – because you can never have too many tabs Main window: the feeds roll into GReader On the right, almost all the functionality of FriendFeed (except search) in fantastic new extension MySocial 24×7 On the right? Yes, because sidebars look better on the right IMHO, made possible by MultiSidebar

Tenuous bioinformatics connection: well, you work more effectively if you’re happy with your browser setup ;)

More social web snippets

Busy. No time for real posts. Brief updates:

• Attila is set to resume the great live thesis online experiment
• I have succumbed to Twitter, woe is me
• On a related note, Firefox extension Shareaholic is a nice idea, if a bit rough round the edges just now

Greasemonkey for scientists

Greasemonkey, if you’ve not yet discovered it, is a Firefox extension that allows small pieces of javascript to modify the look and function of a web page. It’s easy to install and sits unobtrusively down in the browser status bar, from where you can enable/disable it or add and manage scripts.

It might sound like a toy for people who love endless customisation, but there are some great scripts around that can benefit researchers. A few examples:

• Pierre’s pubmed2connotea – adds icons to a PubMed results page to bookmark references at Connotea, CiteUlike or del.icio.us
• Pedro’s postgenomic script – marks articles at Nature journal pages that are discussed at Postgenomic
• Connotea tools – a bunch of scripts to move bookmarks between Connotea and del.icio.us

Lots more scripts can be found at userscripts.org. Another of my favourites, not strictly science-related is two column Google, which displays Google search results in – can you guess? Much more convenient to view if you have 1280×1024 or wider.

The guys at NPG are big on greasemonkey, so be sure to keep an eye on HubLog and Flags and Lollipops. And here’s my short but growing list of resources.