Why would I want an extension?
Sometimes you need some functionality that the web can’t provide. For example, the ability to manipulate or access data on a third-party website is restricted due for valid security reasons.
This is where the power of custom browser extensions shines.
Here are a couple of examples of how have leveraged them to help clients.
InstaZipper
To help a client build their newsletter, we needed to grab some historical tagged images from Instagram, data the Instagram API does not provide.
The easiest way to work around this is to just grab them off the page. We made a browser extension that
- finds all images on an Instagram page
- presents them in a pop up
- allows the user to select one-to-many
- provides an option to download a zip file of the images
- provides an option to download a .json file of the image urls
It works great, although after some *ahem* unpleasantness with Instagrams legal department, we had to replace Insta with Pimpsta in the Chrome app store ☹️
spike.news bot
We made a simple browser extension for spike.news that allows users to send any link on any webpage to a database, and in turn post that to Mastodon via a custom API,