And most importantly, they have a good sense of humor. From Page 381 (my highlights):

If you don’t want to click on the link, they are talking about best practices for url schemas using MVC, and give an example of a link to Amazon as something not to do (I realize the irony of my linking to Amazon above). They then include in an aside:

Note To be very clear, we have only the highest respect for Amazon, who sells more of our books than everyone else combined. We know for a fact that each and every member of the Amazon team is a strikingly intelligent and beautiful person. Not one of them would be so petty as to stop selling our books over something so minor as criticism of their URL format. We love amazon. We adore Amazon. We just wish they would fix their URLs

.Another good one: The authors are talking about using MVC to create a REST API, where the same action name in a given controller can be overridden to handle HTTP Get/Post/Delete requests (page 476, my emphasis):

Now each StaffMember entity in our application can be uniquely addressed using a URL of the form Staff/123, and a client can use the GET, POST, and DELETE HTTP methods to perform operations on those addresses. This is called a RESTful API, except by people who claim to be experts in REST, who will tell you that nothing is truly RESTful except their own code. (We joke—sort of).

Gotta love it.

• Industrious Clock
• Snowflake
• Trogdor
• Fly Guy
• Speed Test
• Text to Speech (AT&T Labs)
• Universe Zoom-In
• Zoom Quilt
• True Facts

Platypus is a Firefox extension which lets you modify a Web page from your browser — “What You See Is What You Get” — and then save those changes as a Greasemonkey script so that they’ll be repeated the next time you visit the page. Editing pages to suit your needs is dandy — but making those changes “permanent” is the real payoff.

Some of the things you can do with Platypus include:

• Remove parts of the page you don’t wish to see.
• Move a part of the page to a different location.
• Change the style and format of page elements.
• Modify all the links on the page using a regular expression.
• Insert your own HTML code.

For those of us (myself included) who have not taken the time to learn how to compose a greasemonkey script, here is an easy to use took that will do it for you.

• MBTA on Google Maps (info)
• Autosave Gmail (info)
• Gmail Delete Button
• Click on mailto link – open Gmail Compose message
• Google Fool (info – you have to read this first)
• MSDN Language Filter (info)

Also, if you want to know more about developing on greasemonkey, then dive into greasemonkey (.org).

Uses cookies to track the “contents” of the searches and might need some page refreshing (I had to log out and log back in to get it to work). Very cool. See here for other Google and Gmail greasemonkey scripts.

Currently displaying results of Yahoo! searches only, it is only a matter of time before more innovative displays of results appear on other search engines. Of course, others are already taking advantage of the the open-ness of Google Maps to do some pretty funky stuff.