Videoembed

Greasemonkey userscript

Role: Programmer Responsibilities: Extend an existing browser script to have more functionality, improve performance. Employer: Self. Duration: 2006-2009.

Comments:

I spend some of my past time frequenting forums and messageboards on the internet. People would post links to interesting videos and articles and everyone would share their opinions on them. I wanted to enhance my experience in these forums and discovered that I could use pieces of javascript code called “userscripts” to do this. A script called “Youtube Embed” allowed me to see youtube videos without having to leave the forum, by embedding them below the links. This script worked fine, however users would post videos from other websites such as metacafe or yahoo videos. I extended it to support those websites. I kept on adding features to the script and rewrote it a couple of times to ensure stability and performance.

This project immensely increased my knowledge of javascript and regular expressions.

Success:

The script accumulated over three thousand concurrent users in its lifetime.

It has been featured on websites such as makeuseof.com, lifehacker.com and mashable.com:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/best-youtube-video-converters/

http://lifehacker.com/356037/watch-youtube-videos-inline-from-any-link

http://mashable.com/2009/01/12/youtube-greasemonkey-scripts/