Alex Feldstein blogs Securing RSS with Bloglines & GreaseMonkey. “What can you do if you wanted to syndicate data securely? Say you wanted to distribute company information but only the intended recipients could read it. Securing RSS Syndication, an article in O’Reilly’s XML.com explains that it is possible, in a way, to do just that today using Bloglines and GreaseMonkey, an extension to the Firefox browser. (Via IO Error)”
AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) provides a runtime environment within the browser that lets you use some of the power of the local workstation. I’ve been using GreaseMonkey and a GreaseMap Javascript add-on to FireFox to show Google maps in a banner when I navigate to a site that includes location metadata. Very cool.
AJAX isn’t new. Google uses something similar to provide a rich client experience in their mail client. The components have been around for a while. Leading-edge columnists like Jon Udell have been talking this stuff up for a while. Note that the Fox wiki has some good links too.