"Self-plagiarism is style"

Amazon.co.uk Greasemonkey script

28th January 2006

Amazon.co.uk Greasemonkey script

posted in Horizon/HIP |

This Greasemonkey script (based on Carrick Mundell's script) for the Firefox web browser adds details of (and links to) our library holdings to the Amazon.co.uk site:

To use the script, you'll need to do the following:

1) Make sure you have the latest version of Firefox installed

2) Go to http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/ and install the Greasemonkey extension

3) Close down all your Firefox browser windows and restart it

4) You should now see a little smiling Greasemonkey at the bottom right hand corner of the browser

5) Now go to http://webcat.hud.ac.uk/firefox/, click on the hudamazon.user.js script, and then click on the "Install" button.

6) Now go to Amazon.co.uk and search for some books!

~ o ~

For reference, here are the various messages that might appear:

1) Available…
Copies of the item are available.

2) Available in electronic format…
Access is available to an electronic version of the item.

3) Due back…
The item is currently on loan.

4) Other editions of this title are available…
We don't have this specific edition of the item, but we do have others - click on the link to show them all.

5) ISBN not found…
The Amazon ISBN doesn't match anything on our catalogue, but you can click on the link to start a title keyword search.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 28th, 2006 at 10:20 am and is filed under Horizon/HIP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 6 responses to “Amazon.co.uk Greasemonkey script”

Why not let us know what you think by adding your own comment! Your opinion is as valid as anyone elses, so come on... let us know what you think.

  1. 1 On February 5th, 2006, Edward Vielmetti said:

    Dave - I just did an equivalent script for Google Book Search - it was minimal changes to the Amazon script to get things to work. Check out my blog http://vielmetti.typepad.com/superpatron for the details.

    posted on February 5th, 2006 at 1:14 am

  2. 2 On March 16th, 2006, Steve Oberg (Family Man Librarian) said:

    Dave, this and other stuff you've been working with is fascinating. I've been trying today to modify your script to do the same for Amazon (US) and can't get it to work. It works fine using my local catalog and pointing to Amazon (UK). What am I missing?

    posted on March 16th, 2006 at 11:25 pm

  3. 3 On March 17th, 2006, Davey P said:

    Hi Steve

    I had to make quite a few changes (especially in the "insertLink" section) to make it work with the UK site.

    Probably the easiest thing to do is to compare it with Carrick's original script (which is designed for the US site) to see what's different.

    Hope that helps!

    posted on March 17th, 2006 at 2:06 pm

  4. 4 On March 20th, 2006, Steve Oberg (Family Man Librarian) said:

    Dave,

    Thank you, I will try to figure things out using the original script as you suggest.

    posted on March 20th, 2006 at 3:19 pm

  5. 5 On August 10th, 2006, Dave Pattern said:

    Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for spotting the script is broken (due to a change in the the Amazon UK HTML).

    I've fixed the script and a new version is available here.

    posted on August 10th, 2006 at 9:55 pm

  6. 6 On April 12th, 2008, Mikele Pasin’s Weblog » Blog Archive » Library 2.0 said:

    [...] Pattern has created a script for Firefox that meshes amazon's results with the local library's availability of the [...]

    posted on April 12th, 2008 at 10:11 am

Leave a Reply