Hacker News Firefox Extension
So I made this little firefox extension to tell me when someone has replied to a comment I made, or posted a comment on a thread I submitted. A little YC icon will appear in your statusbar (ala Firebug) which will highlight whenever you have a new comment. Clicking opens a pane (again, similar to firebug) listing the comments with the ability to click to go straight to the page with the comment (and highlight the new comment if you so desire).
It can be grabbed here if anyone is interested: http://wildstabmedia.com/hackernews
If you want the source to modify it to your own needs or add to it or whatever, just save the .xpi to disk and unzip it.
It was not meant to steal page views from HN, so it really is very simple, and amounts to pretty much just an rss feed to comments related to you. Some notes:
- it does not attempt to display comments in any nested hierarchical way
- column header colors are gimped on Windows (if anyone cares Ill try to fix that)
- the comment tree is currently a fixed height
- without an api, I resorted to a page-scrape of the fetched response, making it brittle (in the event HN changes layout). I made a feature request: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151926
it should work for ff 2 or 3, linux or windows
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 33.3 ms ] threadHow to instal extensions manually: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Installing_Extensions
But, when I went back and did it, it worked appropriately.
Thanks again. I've been using the extension quite a bit today. I really like it.
if you are still using the extension I would suggest re-installing once more. I made some fixes and added a few other things, as well as integrating the Firefox update manager. So if you re-install once more, Firefox will automatically find new updates to it for you from here on.