Foray into plugin writing

September 6, 2016

So, this week I took stab at authoring plugins for a minor inconvenience I had during browsing. The end result is stackgo.

Stackgo is a plugin to automatically redirect Haddock library pages to Stackage pages when went via search engines like Google/Bing etc. For cases, where the package hasn’t been yet added to Stackage - it will just take it to the original Hackage haddock pages.

I have also modified the behavior slightly in some cases when a page is traversed via Hackage or Stackage directly. Yell it here, if you find it unintuitive and we can try to find a solution.

Firefox Addon linkGoogle Chrome webstore link

Experience

Publishing to Google Chrome involved a $5 developer signup fee whereas for firefox, it was free. The plugin was written using WebExtensions which is a cross browser system for developing add-ons. While I’m happy with having to maintain a single codebase for different platforms, it was still a pain. I specifically had to add “tabs” permissions and wrote code in a different way because originUrl was not supported in Chrome. Maybe, things will become better in future. This plugin is expected to work in Opera, although I haven’t tested or published in their ecosystem. Feel free to test/publish there (and report back to me!).

Also, thanks to Christopher Allen for testing and spreading words about it.