November 2023 Development Log (Patreon)

Hey everyone! This new Patreon dashboard is scary. Anyway, here's what I worked on during the month of November, exclusively for patrons.

Peek

Peek is my browser extension for showing previews of links when you hover over them, and in November, I was finally able to complete Peek 6.0. It's a big update!

The main new feature in peek 6.0 is the pop-out button, which moves the hover preview to a new browser window. The popup window can be moved around and resized as needed, and it doesn't automatically hide like the in-page hover preview. 

The new pop-out feature is especially useful for Word documents, PDFs, and other previews that can be difficult to read in the small preview.

Peek 6.0 also adds support for more types of previews: Mastodon posts, Facebook posts, Instagram posts and Reels, Spotify links, and (Instagram) Threads posts. Support for Mastodon posts was a bit of a challenge, because it's more than one domain to check against, but it seems to work well enough in my testing.

I'm pretty happy with the current state of Peek, after the massive rewrite in v5.0 and the few new features in v6.0. The extension's 8th anniversary also happened in November — the first release was on November 24, 2015 — and I'm a bit surprised none of the big browsers have tried to clone it.

Link Cleaner

I rolled out two updates to my Link Cleaner web app in the month of November.

First, I removed the Twitter/X share button because I don't want to encourage people to use that shitty platform anymore. I am leaving Link Cleaner's FixTweet integration in place, at least for now, because that seems like less of a moral issue. I replaced the Twitter/X button with a Reddit button.

I also removed the Psky feature in Link Cleaner, which was an optional toggle in the setings that replaced links to posts on the Bluesky social media network with Psky links. Just like the FixTweet feature, it provides better link previews when the link is pasted into apps like Discord and Telegram.

Bluesky recently added full support for embedded previews, so the Psky service was shut down, so it's not a toggle in Link Cleaner anymore. That's a happy ending!