A First Foray into Chome Extensions

Yesterday I created *arc a simple productivity tool for chome. It lets people archive websites a little bit easier. My main use case is just saving information that someone might choose to delete later.

A recent website lets you easily save tweets, they've got a bookmarklet and an API as well. So I thought to myself, it'd be nice to be able to save a tweet with a single click, and if you're on a website be able to save that as well. While thinking about this, I decided it'd be better to have a single button and have it be context aware of the current tab open.

This led to some pretty simple code: 

var arcGenerator = {
  genArc: function(url) {
    /* If on twitter also send to tweetsave */
    if(url.match(/twitter.com\/[^\/]+\/status/)){
      setTimeout(function(){
        open('http://tweetsave.com/?tweet='+encodeURIComponent(url))
      },10)
      
    } 
    setTimeout(function(){
      open('https://archive.today/?run=1&url='+encodeURIComponent(url))  
    },10)    
  },
};

document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function () {
  chrome.tabs.query(
    {
      'active': true,   
      'windowId' : chrome.windows.WINDOW_ID_CURRENT
    }, 
    function(tabs){
      var tab = tabs[0];
      var url = tab.url;
      arcGenerator.genArc(url);
    });
});

And that's it, there's the manifest.json file as well, and a popup.html to call the code above, which you can find in the repository. The only issue I ran into was getting the current tab from the extension.

The code above will work with the latest chromium and chrome, In chromium you can use either: 

chrome.tabs.query({'active' : true, 'windowId' : chrome.windows.WINDOW_ID_CURRENT})

or 

chrome.tabs.query({active: true, lastFocusedWindow: true})

But the latest stable build of chrome (38.0.2125.111) will give you a bad result from the second. The only caveat I can say to that is that when the second option wasn't working, I didn't have the "tabs" permission in my manifest file. So it may just have been that issue and both work.

Either way, the extension is out there, and literally took less than a half hour to make. The only thing I'd call tricky about it would be that in order to have both TweetSave and Archive.today open from a single click, it is neccesary to use the setTimeout function to wrap both the open calls.

If you find the extension useful let me know! I'd be interested in hearing what it's being used for and if it's helping anyone.

The Google Chrome Store was easy to use, pay $5.00 for your developers access to the store (the terms say it's to help weed out spam). Then the developer dashboard is easy to navigate and update your plugins. The only suggestion I'd make to Google would be to make a "Your Apps" link to your own developed apps from the main chrome store page, instead of having to go to the developer center first, then see the link. It'd be nice to have a faster way to share the url of your own plugins.

Edit: The owner of TweetSave contacted me and suggested to narrow the TweetSave archiving link to just statuses since TweetSave only archives status updates. Version 1.2.1 in the store handles this.