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Amazon.com Greasemonkey Script

Gerd Saurer — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:00:45 +0000

Most people writing about books in the Web are linking to amazon.com nowadays. I like it because the reviews there give you some clue about the book and if it is worth buying it. The only problem is that I normally order my books on the German amazon website. To add an book to my wish list or at least to find it there I always had to copy the ISBN number, to open the German site and search there for the product. This was really anoying for me. Therefore i decided to write a small Greasemonkey script that adds an link to other amazon sites (at the moment only the german site) and shows me the price they offer the book there.

This is the first version and it is not looking very fancy at all but it works and saves me time. If you also want to use it you can download the version from my website.

Location != Language

Gerd Saurer — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 21:11:23 +0000

As web applications get used international the need to translate them into several languages gets bigger and bigger. Google describes in on of their last blog entries how proud they are to support 170+ Laguages for some of their applications. They even try to include the community to do translation on their own.

Everyone understands the need for translation of the services to provide the services to persons in their own language. The question is how to find out the right language for the current user. There are several ways:

Use the browser default Language
Let the user decide which language to use
Use the location of the request to choose a language

Google as many other services decided to use the third of the above options. Let me explain why i do not think that is an good idea.

I travel at least once a month to Hungary for a weekend because my girlfriend comes from there. Last week we spent several days there. I used the time to change my blog to WordPress as already described in my last posting. As i was playing araound with Blogger i noticed several of the following Screens:

Believe me i try to learn speak hungarian but the language is very difficult to learn so I understand not really very much of the information Blogger gave me. My browser is configured to use English (en) as my default language.

I can not understand why Google simple ignores the browser configuration and just guesses the language out of the location I surf from.

Google Reader Feeds

Gerd Saurer — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 14:53:00 +0000

On one of my last post i was writing about Meta RSS Feeds and that it would be nice if Google Reader would support a possibility to get feeds for special tags. I just step over a post by Niall Kennedy (already posted in December 2005) that describes how you can use the API of Google Reader and subscribe to special tags. Be aware that not all stuff posted there is still working. The API is similar to gdata.

After a short look into my Reader settings i found that you can share special tags also within the readers settings.

I must admit that i have not seen the settings as i was writing my last post.

Google Search Results

Gerd Saurer — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 14:01:00 +0000

Lately i noticed some changes in the search results of google. More and more rss news feeds are returned as top results as you can see in the screenshot below. This is really a big problem becaus if you click on it immediately your configured RSS reader opens (in my case this is the Google Reader). So what to do now? First of all normally i don’t want to add the feed to my subscriptions and second i am sure that this post is too old to appear in the list of the latest RSS items.

I just have the option to open the cached element from Google (which is an extracted XML content and not really pretty) or i can copy the URL that was found and try to find the posting by searching on the original blog.
Both possibilities are unusable and not user friendly.My suggestion for Google is that RSS news feed entries have to Link to the original post. The link to the post is normally provided in the feed.