A Fistful of Greasemonkey Scripts To Pimp Up Your Gmail and Reader

By Mark O’Neill

In my humble opinion, the two best things to happen to the internet was Firefox and Greasemonkey. With these two tools by your side, if you don’t like the way a website is laid out, you can write a script and change it. Or find someone who has already written a script. This makes Google and other Google services highly customisable.

I’m sure you don’t need me to explain what Firefox is. For those of you still unfamiliar with Greasemonkey, this is a Firefox extension that allows you to run scripts to change how a website looks and / or acts. Don’t like the search box in a certain way? Well then make a Greasemonkey script and move it! Want to change the colours of your Gmail account? No problem.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of scripts out there. Some of them are absolute gems but there are countless useless scripts made by people with too much time on their hands. So as a public service, I have gone through them all one by one and I have listed below the ones you should be looking at. This post will concentrate on Gmail and Google Reader. In future posts, we’ll cover other Google services.

Gmail :

Gmail Macros – Extra (customizable) keyboard shortcuts and macros.

Gmail Conversation Preview – Right-click to preview a message.

Gmail Full Width – Makes conversations occupy full width by removing the advertisement block on the right.

Gmail Signature Float – Moves your signature in Gmail to the top of the message rather than the bottom.

Gmail with different attachment icons – See from your inbox what kind of attachment an email has.

Folders for Gmail – organise your Gmail labels in a folder-like hierachy.

Label Colors – give labels different colours to give your inbox a splash of colour.

Fix Gmail bar – this script makes the top bar in Gmail move as you scroll up and down the screen.

Gmail Colorizer – give your Gmail conversations different color schemes.

Gmail & Google Reader – adds a link to Reader inside Gmail.

Gmail & Google Calendar – adds a link to Calendar inside Gmail.

Persistent Searches – save your searches so you don’t have to repeatedly type the same things.

Google Reader :

A lot of Reader scripts have been made redundant due to Google integrating the features into Reader themselves (such as the search box). Mashable has a pretty comprehensive list but here’s three more I really like.

Smart Google Reader subscribe button – detects the RSS feed on the page and then finds out if you are subscribed to that feed. If so, it will display a tick. If not, you can click on it and be subscribed. Useful if you subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds.

Add to Del.icio.us – allows you to post RSS posts directly to your Del.icio.us account.

Smart Subscribe – one that saved my sanity. It bypasses the page where it asks if you want to subscribe to a feed on your Google homepage or on the Reader. It automatically goes straight to Reader.

Next time, I will list scripts for the Google homepage and search results pages.     Bookmark Google Reader or subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t miss it!