In the process of househunting, Ames and I have spent a lot of time on Realtor.com checking and rechecking for listings that match our criteria and budget. This process has been fun, but frustrating as well because the technology doesn’t quite meet my expectations. In particular, the map views on realtor.com are quite the annoyance. In the past, if I wanted to see where a listing was, I’d copy and paste the address into Google Maps and navigate using their much more user-friendly interface. Not anymore.

Enter Greasemonkey, an extension for Mozilla browsers that lets you define “user scripts” to specified webpages. Thanks to Greasemonkey and Birdman (programmer extraordinnaire), there is know a handy link to the Google Map of each house I look at. Since this is a functionality we thought a lot of other people could really use, we posted it up on the GreaseMonkeyUserScripts Wiki. There are literally hundreds of user scripts that have been written for Grease Monkey in the last few months, and the creators of the extension are planning to create a proper script directory at http://userscipt.org which will be much more searchable. In the mean time, be sure to check out book burro, Geocaching.com scripts, and of course our Greased Realtor script.