July 2023 Development Log (Patreon)

Hi! Here's everything I worked on in the month of July 2023, exclusively for Patreon supporters.

Share to Mastodon

Share to Mastodon is a browser extension for quickly sharing your current page or any link to the Mastodon social network. I released version 2.1 in July with a few minor changes and new features.

The main change in this release is that Share to Mastodon now uses the same layout for the welcome and settings pages as Peek 5.0. The welcome page now explains how the extension works (in case the user didn't fully read the extension description before installing), and contains links to the settings pages, donation options, and full changelog on GitHub. The updated settings page has the same basic layout.

I also made some functional changes to the settings page. The "Add server" text field now accepts full URLs, since I recieved at least one reportfrom someone who was confused about the required formatting. For example, pasting "https://toot.community/home" into the text field will convert it to the required format of "toot.community" automatically.

I also added a line below the text field explaining that Share to Mastodon also works with some non-Mastodon services. While I was working on this update, I found out that the extension already worked with Misskey, another Federated social media platform, because Misskey duplicated Mastodon's share URL scheme. That feature carried over when Misskey was forked to create Calckey, which is now known as Firefish. Firefish has been gaining a lot of traction recently, so it's cool that I don't have to do any additional work to support it..

Link Cleaner

I added two new features to Link Cleaner in July. First, if you use Link Cleaner in Microsoft Edge, it will now appear as a suggested site in the sidebar. You can click the plus (+) button to see it, and you can pin it to the sidebar for easy access at any time. I probably need to change Link Cleaner's design a bit when it's being used in narrow modes like Edge's sidebar, but the existing layout is still usable.

The other change is a new Amazon affiliate ID setting in the settings page. If you add an affiliate code in that field, it will be appended to any Amazon product links after they are cleaned. I added that feature because I was working on some Prime Day content at my day-job at How-To Geek and it helped speed up my editing process, but it might be useful to others as well.

Peek

I started working on the next update for my Peek browser extension, which is already turning out to be pretty cool. Peek displays small previews for links when you hover over them, with support for a few different file types (PDFs, Office documents, videos, etc) and web services (Reddit posts, Imgur links, etc). I'm now testing support for Mastodon post previews, which was a bit difficult to implement, because I can't match against a single domain — there are thousands of Mastodon servers. I'm still testing this to make sure there aren't too many false positives.

I also added support for previewing Facebook posts, Instagram posts, and Instagram Reels. The Facebook posts aren't scrollable due to how the embed code works, but Instagram links work perfectly. Just like the other content previews, the embed code is loaded in a sandboxed iframe element. I'm also looking into the possibility of adding per-type preview toggles in this update or the next one. Previews for songs, albums, and podcasts on Spotify are also working in this update.

The feature I'm most excited about is the new popout window functionality. Peek previews now have a small arrow button (the UI here will change), and clicking that will move the popup preview to a browser window popup. The standalone windows can be moved around and resized as needed, and they don't automatically hide when your mouse moves away. The content of the preview is identical in both modes, though there are a few minor differences — for example, moving a PDF preview to a new window will give you more buttons and view options, since there's more available space.

There are a few bugs and other changes that I still need to address, so I'm not sure if this update will be done before the end of August or not.

PhotoStack

I rolled out the new version of PhotoStack to all users on July 7. I already wrote a full post about that, so I won't repeat myself here, but it's nice to finally have that done!