At work, I have a subscription to Books24x7 which is an online library of technical and business books. Its like that other service from OReilly, but my work uses this instead. When I am browsing through books on the site, its kind of annoying having all the buttons that normally show in Firefox or IE. Then I found out about Prism from Mozilla. Its not brain-dead easy to set up, but its also not too difficult. Just install Prism, then create a configuration file, zip it up, rename the file, and run it.

So let me go through this in a bit more detail. First I installed the application. Just follow the prompts. Now create a configuration file called webapp.ini. The contents should be something like:

[Parameters]
id=Books@technovangelist.com.PRISM
uri=http://skillport.books24x7.com/bookshelf.asp
status=yes
location=no
sidebar=no
navigation=yes

Now zip up the file to something with a webapp extension. Since mine is for Books24x7, I called it books24.webapp. Now double-click on it and it opens a window that goes straight to the site, no extra buttons. Thats great, but the size of the window was wrong. So I added one file to the zip file and called it webapp.js. The contents of the file are here:

function resize()
  {
    window.resizeTo(850,1000);
  };
window.onresize=resize;
resize();

This is just some simple javascript that resizes the window. Now I have exactly what I wanted. When reading a book online, this helps make it as easy as possible to read without getting distracted.