Quick update: version 0.2.1

Hi there,

Had to perform a quick, silent update last night. I found another weird thing when editing some config options... Now that seems to be working fine.

Also, a user reported that the string to be searched (what you define as %s on the url) was not working properly if there were more than one %s on the same URL. I never really thought it might be  necessary but he shoed me a site that required that. So, it now works with more than one %s on the URL.

Cheers!

Ver 0.2 changelog

So, this is the complete list of stuff that was updated with this last review

1. Manifest version 2 support: Google had us developers update the manifest version of the extension, to ensure support on future Chrome versions. This update implied that I made a few architectural changes to the extension... forces code separation, and encrypted connection to external resources is now mandatory. I had to make quire a lot of changes to the code, which mean nothing to most users... code is cleaner now, though, so in the end it's for the best... won't complain :) If you want to know more about this, you can check it out here.
   For the time being, I removed the reference to the Featured Search Engines list which was on my site, because I don't have an SSL certificate there... the list is now local, so if I want o update it, I'll have to upload a new version... it sucks, but I'm not updating that list so often, so I'm not sure it's worth it... I'll also change that list component soon, so I'll review this when that comes.
2. Bug fixes
1. weird search link behaibour: on a past post I explained this... not much else to say but sorry, I don't really know what happened.
2. default focus not working: also explained on a past post... I messed that feature last time I updated the extension and took me a while to realize. Sorry!!! ó.o
3. Cleanup migration code: again, something users won't notice... there was some code to support updating from really old versions... not really needed now -I hope!-
4. Localization Support: it took me a while to implement, and as of this version, only English and Spanish are supported, but from now on, I can add support for other languages... Translators are welcome! if you want the extension on your language, drop me a comment and I'll send you a file to complete it... I haven't figured out a better way to do this... If I do find a better way to do this, I'll post something here.
   Chrome support for localization is great, in general, but it lacks some basic stuff... of I'm way off the mark... the Options page HTML code took me a while to set-up for translations... I had to use some tricky jQuery replacements of text/code for it to work, and am not convinced that's the best way to go... I'll have to read some more.

That's it! seems sooo much little but it was sooo much work :(

The ToDo list is huge, though... so I hope I'll get a new version up soon.

Cheers,

Diego

New version: 0.2

Hi there!

This must have been the longest time without uploading a new version... shame on me... a buggy version, last one.
There was this one defect, which I'm not really sure why was caused, which had your link order all wrong after having the extension running for a while... Editing any configuration option solved the issue but was a pain... I still don't know why this started happening... the only conclusion I could get to, is that the indexes for the contextual menus were altered after a while, by something else than my extension... so when you clicked on a search link, its index corresponded to an above link, or something like that... messy...
I removed the use of chrome indexes, and now I use an index of my own, saved on the config... I hope I didn't break anything with this.
Another bug was with the default focus option... I broke it on the last version and took me a while to realize... and did never get the message of a bug report, posted on 8/1/2012... apologies to that user.

I've had little time to work on this, I apologize for the delay on my response... I'd love to say it won't take that long next time, but can't promise anything! :D

I'll post a complete list of the changelog on another post... lots of stuf... the worst thing is that the ToDo list is still huge! :P

Thanks again for all the positive feedback, and apologies for the inconveniences.

Cheers,

Help me translate!

Hi there!
As of version 0.2, I'm supporting internationalization on my extension.
This means the extension's interface can be displayed on the same language your browser is set as default.

To do so, I need help with the translations!

I've already translated it to Spanish, but if you want it translated to your own language, please post a comment and we'll get in touch.

Thanks/Gracias/Arigato/Grazzie/etc... you know

Happy B-day S=S+S ^.^

One year since I published the first public version! :D
Time flies!
I just managed to publish 01.7.5 which has very little over last version -which was 3 days ago-.
I improved usability -and code- on the main Search Engines list, on the Option's page. Toy with it and you'll notice.

I'm just taking a look at the stats, and they are really cool, the way the extension is being used... I'm really glad it is useful to other people. A really nice feelling.

We'll I'm too tired, way past my bed time. I'll post some 1 year stats soon.

Again, thanks for using it!

Cheers :)

Version 0.1.7.4: options page revamped

Last months have been crazy. Not much time to dedicate to this, but the Options Page has been calling to my inner designer instincts.

So here it is, as from today, your Options page should look a lot different.... A lot alike Chrome's own tools page... A complete rip off, I should say.

I've come so far as to copy a few stylesheets and an image from its code! Let's call it "repurpose" or "reuse" (don't really know if the word applies to what I want to say).
I've would have linked to them directly, but extensions are not allowed to access those Chome resources, it seems.

I specially recommend widgets.css. It's simple, elegant, and gives your basic html form controls a great cool look. Don't know how compatible this is to other browsers, nor care for the purposes of this extension, but I recommend it.

Besides the look&feel of the Options page, haven't done much. A few minor code improvements.

I have a few requests from users, which I'll post latter. Most of them require that I inject some code to all the pages you visit. I'm trying to decide if is it worth it or not. Probably not worth it.

So, that's it for today.... Thanks again to the users who are buying on amazon using my extension.... I've been getting a few bucks which I'll soon use to get some cool stuff :)
I should also share some with German, who keeps suplying cool icons... Yes, not all of them are "borrowed" from Chrome.

Cheers!

Other reviews on content farms

So, these guys from Softango have this review of my extension, an old version, but I'm grateful.
They rank ok on google, so better for me. I don't really mind it's an old version they are promoting, since the options page will redirect users with older versions to the official Google web-store to get the latest one.

What I don't get is how they say it's been downloaded +14k times... It's not. I'm sure about it. I would know!

Why would they be wrong about it? I know they are in only for the traffic...
Their review is not that good, they even copied some text from my description and forgot to edit it. Even that, I don't really mind...
But lying like that on the downloads.... Does not feel right...

In comparison with the guys from Softpedia, who had the decency to email me letting me know that they where promoting my extension, and that if did I want to make any comments or text edits I was welcome to... these guys from Softango need to learn how to deal with the software developers.
Of course we'll (at least me) be more than willing to cooperate with them, it's in our best interest! And we'll try and be the best content providers we can...

For any content farm, what else could they ask for?

Domo ^.^

Ok, so I sometimes check URL referrals to my site and this one caught my eye... it seems to be a description, help and detailed information on my extension... written on Japanese! :D nice!
They even took the time to post some URLs to use on Japanese sites (I'll add them to my links list)...
The screenshot, with Japanese links on my extension, also surprised me since it's got a gazillion links!... i wonder how many links does everyone use? y only use 4 or 5 links... I might run a poll about it, maybe there's something I'm not considering when someone uses many links?

I cannot tell who posted this, so I don't have anyone in particular to say thanks... so at least, thank you GigaFree.net!

There's a few other places where the extension is mentioned... but this of course, is the coolest... cuz it's in Japanese, obviously.

TY Amazon! :D

Yay! I'm getting richer by the hour! Last week I got my first 0.73 USD from Amazon! 
To the one extension user that bought Been There, Should've Done That: 995 Tips for Making the Most of College and How to Study, I don't have a way to know who you are, but thank you! Feel free to comment on this post so I get to know your name, and by the way, tell us about those books... and for the looks of it, good luck studying!
Don't pay attention to my amigo Guillermo, who says (I'll roughly translate this) "Formal education will destroy your brain"... he's only partially right :D
No, seriously, thank you!! !  :D

In case you're wondering, this is related to this post.

Support this humble extension developer

Of course, this extension is for free -I built it for me, actually-... but if you really enjoy using it, and you'd like to show your appreciation, here's a list of things that might make me happy :)

• Show me the money: Hit the donate button at the top right of this page... and send me a few bucks!
• Make Amazon pay me: Use any of the Amazon links featured on the options page, search stuff using my extension and buy it! If I had the links set up properly and my affiliate account is working -haven't tested it yet-, I might get a few bucks from Amazon... and it costs you zero! (Thanks to Daniel Costas for the idea :D).
• Guerrilla advertising: Share on Twitter, post on Facebook, G+ or wherever you feel this extension might be well received.
• More Guerrilla advertising: Now that you're reading my blog, follow it -I don't write that much- post a comment and link to any of these posts. G+ the posts you like.
• Boost my self esteem: Rate the extension on Google's webstore, say how much you love it!

Thanks again for following

0.1.7.3 is out

Hey there, a few days ago I published 0.1.7.3, which has a few code fixes and one new feature called "Search on all!" which will basically search your selection on all your configured search engines at the same time, opening a tab for each result...
I'm not sure how useful this is... is it?
I had plans to do this for a while, and a comment from Jon to my last post (thanks again!) made me remember it.
As per Jon's request, to enable some kind of "bulk search" if you select multiple lines, I'm working on it... I'll have to change the way the selection is analyzed, so far I was working with some default context menu option (selectionText), which will always return a string of text, with no break lines, so there's no way to tell if there's multiple lines on the selection.
The trick is to parse the selection as HTML (using x.Selector.getSelected()), decide which HTML tags I'll parse as line breakers, and try and iterate through the line breaks, strip the text of other HTML tags, and perform search queries per each line...
I still have a few things to figure out before I do this, such as how will all this work from an UX perspective... but it's a nice challenge.

I hope next version will include this feature...

As for this one, the only other change was on the options page. I removed the "ToDo list" since there was little there remaining... and I will be posting it here...

In its place, I included a few "suggestions" on how you could support this extension's developer (aka me), which I'll also be posting here.

Ps: if you're interested on x.Selector.getSelected(), here's my question at stack overflow and its answer (Thank you Richard)

OMG I got my first donation! :D

In this humble post, I wanted to officially thank Winston K. for his generosity in helping me get cool stuff by donating (see the big donate button at the right of this post...).

Thank you Winston, I really hope other fellow users share your enthusiasm! :D

I'm really happy for the feedback I've been getting... As I said, this I did this extension for myself, mostly, so this is a big bonus.

Thanks again!

Oops :P

Been breaking stuff lately.

First I tried to use "Open Sans" with my Blogger Template, and broke it... it stills look a bit funky... it seems that if you choose that font on the Advanced Options, it doesn't really work and all you see is an ugly serif font... well... found a way to fix it -need to add the CSS code by hand-, so I'll be doing it soon.

The most important broken stuff is that by trying to fix the %s & %S issue on version 0.1.7 I took the fast track, and "lowercased" the hole search string... which is bad, you know :)

Thanks to Keith for letting me know that I was forcing the whole search string to lower case... now I've fixed it and quick published a fix on version 0.1.7.1

Sorry about that :)

What's new on v 0.1.7

Long time, no update...

I'm glad I got a few requests... it feels nice to know people use what I did.
I have 3 special thanks for this publication: Ahmed, Damien and Theodor. All three of them are using the extension and contributed to part of what I've updated.

Damien requested a cool thing, that unfortunately for now, I haven't been able to figure out completely:
Have you noticed how the "Search on Google" menu link works?...
I'll try and describe: It has a pretty weird way of opening your search result on a new tab (right next to the original tab), gives it default focus, you close it and then get back to the original page... so it goes back one tab... which is not a standard behavior for tab closing (when you close a tab, you get to the next one).
If instead of closing the new tab, you then move to another tab, and then back to the new one, then the closing behavior applies: the next tab will show up when you close the "new" one...
(mmmh I don't know if you get my meaning, please, try it and you'll get it...)

Well, I tried to imitate the Search on Google's way, but couldn't so far. :(

Opening the results on the next tab is not a big deal. What's complicated is having Chrome remember how to get back to the previous tab...
What I've done so far, is to allow the user to decide where to open the new tab (First, Last, Next Previous)... and if they don't mind a weird config, they can select "Previous" as an option, their new tab will get focus, before the "old" tab... they can read whatever they want, and then close it and get the "next" tab, which is the "old" one :P ugly... but does the trick... hope Damien likes it...

Other stuff I've done on this publication: you'll now get a notice whenever a new update is loaded (the options page will pop-up and the new version id should appear).
Also loved the "Open sans" font on some of the new options pages for Chomre (on Dev version, at least), so I decided to update the font type on the options page... I like it much more now.

Fixed a few typos and minor bugs and finally, I added a "donate" button :)
I don't make a living of this, and as I said before, I built this extension for me, mostly, so I don't expect to earn money out of it... but if you're on a generous mood, and feel like showing your appreciation, now you can do so :) heh...

Well, that's it... here's the full change log, have fun.

New on v 0.1.7

- Added "New tab position" parameter: You can now select where you want your new tabs to open (Thanks Damien, I know this doesn't work exactly as you wanted, but it's something).
- Fixed little bug on "Featured Search Engines" list, where some search engines wouldn't work.
- %s on search URL now supports %S (Thanks Ahmed!)
- Fixed typo on Help (thanks Theodor!)
- Using "Open sans" as a default font for options -nicer, right?-.
- Added Update notification
- New Donate button... I hope you like it :)