Webchunks on any web site, give it a try ?-)
By glazou on Monday 8 September 2008, 15:30 - Mozilla - Permalink
I guess the title says it all. Firefox will show a short help page after extension's installation. Feedback welcome!
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Comments
The addon is cool, except that your force a toolbar and the toolbar button cannot be moved along when customizing the toolbar!
A good solution to the thing I posted above could be to have an option to have all the chunks in a menu/dropdown from the main toolbar button. Then the main toolbar button can be moved around like anything else in the toolbarpalette!
One of the commenters to the last post compared this to safari widgets. One thing I use the safari widgets for is the BBC weather forecast:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/ukweat...
I slice the central section, which shows me the weather without the other guff. This works because the widget is displaying the whole page, but just hiding the bits I didn't select. However if I try this in the webchunks extension, I just see the base weather map without the actual forecast - presumably only a fragment of the html is actually being parsed - missing the code that loads the weather overlay?
A second issue: I tried to select the top story at slashdot.org as a test, since that changes often. Its updating ok, but displays the story with black text on a black background.
Works nicely on metcheck.com though
@Baz: the Webslices spec says all script are disabled in the webslice view...
One more thing... something that sucks about the safari version is that you can't zoom the slice. That map, for example, is much bigger than it needs to be. Firefox records per-site preferences for zooms, but this info isn't used by the webchunk. Would be nice if it was
@Baz: and yes, I know about the slashdot issue, although the issue is on their side, not on mine : the CSS styles of the page are painful and really not made to extract a slice of the page...
@Daniel - re BBC, slashdot, yes I expected it would be something like that.
Another possible bug. Checking for news of the Vuelta:
http://www.lavuelta.com/08/ingles/n...
I selected the entire yellow-outlined news section. The chunk displays with unknown characters in several places, oddly enough displaying the word "Sabiñánigo" correctly in the grey title block but incorrectly in the body text.
It looks like the chunk is being rendered as utf-8 when the source is iso-8859-1.
Hi
The extension is not working for me: clicking ok in the popup to create a new webchunk does nothing (the popup stays open). No error in the console.
@Baz: oooh, good catch ! Will fix that.
I got a crash trying to add a webchunk. The same one had worked for me earlier, but I deleted it and was showing someone else and tried it again and got a crash. I was on the San Jose Mercury News site.
See crash report for more details:
http://crash-stats.mozilla.com/repo...
So far, works like a charm. Only annoyance (aside from some missing styling) is that it seems to update every time I click on it. Would be great if it could cache at least for a few minutes, update periodically and display the time of the last update.
Also some default styling would be nice: at least font family and size. Oh, and also some way of exporting and importing webchunks would be nice so I can share them at will.
good job!
Now I use it to track comments, but in long conversations I'm unable to scroll down, webchunks does not support scrolling.
(basically the rest of this says could you make it scroll if it overflows?)
Loving the extension, and it works mostly ok everywhere for me. But one thing that doesn't seem to exist is handling of pages that are too tall for the monitor. My work monitor is kind of tiny, and if i want to, for example, keep track of http://www.steapandcheap.com , i often can't read the description text.
Shrinking or scrolling a page that is larger than the monitor would be nice, and fwiw i think my preference would be scrolling.
Other missing feature is to be able to open the whole page in a new tab (it should be by default) instead of replacing the current one.
what could be added to make it more user friendly:
-while waiting for the user to click on an element, right-click cancels the whole thing.
-on a 'chunk' in the bar: middle mouse click on the 'open' button opens the page in a new tab.
i have chunked a news page that lacks a rss feed (i guessed it's more or less the purpose of the extension). i'll give some news back when some news is added.
Works for McSurfer, but no go for Stormpulse (keeps telling me I need Java 8, but I already have J8).
Thanks for this - it's already simplified a couple things for me.
I second those who have issues with the fixed toolbar; I customize the heck out of my toolbars and buttons. I would really appreciate being able to move the buttons around the browser as with regular toolbars.
Also nice would be a way to edit existing Webchunks without deleting and remaking them.
Thanks for your work!
Another killing feature would be being able to know if the webchunk has changed or not (with a visual mark next to the button).
If you implement a cache would be easy. It would compare the actual cached page with the new one and mark it as new if is not the same.
This is great!
It would be more useful if you could select a group of elements for a more complete chunk. If I wanted to select multiple cells in a table, or multiple tables, it does not work.
Addon doesnt work for me. Same problem as Klint.after selecting a new slice dialog stays open and I can't click ok only cancel. Even on demo sites.
+ 1 same problem.
Incompatible with the All-in-One Sidebar 0.7.6 extension. ????
pertin, yes, disabling AiO sidebar helps. It is actually not a problem of saving the WebChunks, it is just most of all a display problem.
it's finally working pretty well, nice work !
as suggested, it would be nice if the extension checked the content automatically and make the icon shine (or something else) to alert of new content.