This newsletter has an online archive that lists all its previous issues, so anytime you want to go back and find an article, you can point your browser at the following link, and you'll see them all: http://systeminetwork.com/sipt

One thing that bugs me, however, is that the article titles aren't shown on the same page with the issue dates. If I know I've published an article, but I can't remember which date I published it under, I have to click each issue link to see the topics, or I have to hope I remember enough of the content to use the search tool.

In the preceding issue of this newsletter ("Browser Scripting with Greasemonkey," March 26, 2009, article ID 57901 at SystemiNetwork.com), I mentioned that there's a Firefox tool named Greasemonkey that lets you, among other things, make your own personal customizations to web pages when you don't like the way the pages work. Well, guess what I did? I used Greasemonkey to put all the article titles on the same page with the issue dates.

Without My Script

This is what the newsletter archive looks like right now. There are similar archives for System iNEWS as well as the other newsletters that System iNetwork publishes. You get to this newsletter archive by clicking the Newsletters button in the top navigation bar on SystemiNetwork.com.

As you can see, the page shows nothing but the dates. You have to click each date to see what's in the newsletter. You can view issues published in previous years by clicking the year number.

I frequently find myself in this newsletter index looking for an article that I remember publishing, but I don't remember the exact name or date. To see what's available, I have to click each date to list the topics for that date. The process can be very time-consuming.

I could, of course, use the Search box in the upper right-hand corner of the web page (not shown in the picture above), but I often find that I don't know which keywords to search for, and unless I have some pretty good keywords, I end up with too many results from my search.

With My Script

After installing Greasemonkey and clicking the Install Script link at the end of this article, I can refresh the page, and it'll look like this:

A few important notes:

• The first time you run it for a given year, it takes a long time. The article titles will appear gradually.
• The script is running in the background and loading each newsletter issue separately, parsing out the article titles and adding them to the page.
• The script will save the article titles in Firefox's configuration, so next time you visit the page, the titles should appear very quickly.
• The script will work with the other newsletters in addition to System iNetwork Programming Tips.

Installing the Script

• You must be running a recent version of Mozilla Firefox.
• You must have the Greasemonkey add-on installed.
• Click here to install the script.

More Information

For more information about Greasemonkey scripts, please see "Browser Scripting with Greasemonkey" from the March 26, 2009, issue of this newsletter.