I started writing this as a development post, but it turned out to be way too long and detailed. I wanted an announcement and short description post instead, so here we are. I’ll do the separate development post later.
a waht?
URL Stats Extractor: A Chrome extension to show the stats and relevant information about shortened links.
For the first release, the extension supports the goo.gl shortener simply because that’s the shortener of choice for me at the moment. Perhaps once I get the basic abstraction down (which this first release lacks), I can start to add other services like bit.ly and so on.
why?
Well, because I can and because I want to. I’m sure there are a dime a dozen of these out there, but this exercise wasn’t just about the convenience of knowing the stats of a shortened URL. This exercise was done to get myself to start coding an extension and see where it leads. So yes, it’s been done before, but I haven’t done it yet, so here we are.
I also wanted to get my hands dirty with git and GitHub since I’ve been meaning to pick up a modern SCM system, so that’s also my reason. I hope it’ll be a fun work in progress that, as time passes, can be tinkered with to add new and interesting functionality. At worst, it’ll get me a little more versed with chrome extension programming, git, and brush up my javascript skills.
where?
I’m pushing this to the official Chrome Webstore, as well as to GitHub, so you can either use it, fork it, or abuse it in whatever manner you see fit.
- URL Stats Extractor
- Extension: Chrome Webstore
- Source: GitHub
- Development Diary: http://goo.gl/MUWAt
feedback
Yep, let me know what you think, what’s broken (there’s a lot), what would be neat to do with it. Fork it, pull it, do what you like with it.
It’s very raw at the moment since this is essentially a very quick hack (though it took me a bit of time to clean it up for GitHub). The plugin works decently with static pages, but dynamically loaded pages wont work since the plugin currently doesnt detect new content and it doesn’t periodically rescan. It’s also not going to do much for content with no hits since the dataset returned apparently isn’t compatible… need to tweak that. The display is a little ugly; more on that once the development post goes up.
Enjoy. Go break it.