I recently released a version of my Lotus Connections greasemonkey script for adding dynamic drop-down menus for use with IBM’s myDeveloperWorks. You can download this script from userscripts.org: IBM My developerWorks drop-down menus

Improvements to myDeveloperWorks

MyDeveloperWorks is awesome but sometimes navigating between sections gets annoying if you are someone that constantly uses this site. Jumping between Blogs to your Groups could involve multiple page loads and clicks by default. This script can help eliminate that unnecessary browsing by adding drop-down menus to the site’s existing menu.

Default menu on myDeveloperWorks

When you install this script, it will add some standard drop-down menus and it will also load your specific items such as your groups, bookmarks, and activities.

Showing dynamic and customized drop-down menus that are added by this script

Script details

Interested in the code?  This Greasemonkey script uses jQuery 1.2.3 to perform most of its work. jQuery makes creating Greasemonkey scripts amazingly easy to work with the Document Object Model (DOM) as well as adding fancy effects and performing Ajax calls.

jQuery is mostly focused on the user of selectors to uniquely identify content in a similar manner to CSS selectors.  This selector behavior is awesome for greasemonkey scripts because you cannot always easily parse a site’s HTML with standard Javascript and the code becomes extremely complex.  jQuery allows you spend your time on improving the user experience rather than deal with the plumbing.