The health of software is not good. I was reminded of that when I went looking for Pinboard extensions that would better integrate my Pinboard collection with Google Chrome. The official Pinboard Chrome extension was last updated in 2011. That’s too old for safe use, and I don’t trust most 3rd party Chrome extensions.
Happily I remembered Chrome’s custom search engine feature (yeah, from 2011, the year software died, again).
Pinboard’s search string follows the classic pattern for extensibility, an embedded URL of the form:
search my stuff: https://pinboard.in/search/u:jgordon?query=ReplaceMe
search all stuff: https://pinboard.in/search/?query=ReplaceMe&all=Search+All
From these patterns I created two search shortcuts in Chrome in two of my identities [1], these will sync across my Chrome instances:
https://pinboard.in/search/u:jgordon?query=%s
https://pinboard.in/search/?query=%s&all=Search+All
When I was done adding these and cleaning up others Chrome had added automatically [2] I had this:
and here’s what Chrome shows when I type “p aperture” in the omnibus, prior to hitting enter/return:
That’s better, and cleaner, workflow integration than any of the extensions I’ve seen.
- fn -
[1] My biggest Chrome frustration is that in Windows I can specify which identity Chrome should use at launch, but in OS X I have to launch then switch.
[2] It strikes me that this is an attack vector — there’s probably a way for a site to trick Chrome into adding large numbers of these, some with bad actions.
No comments:
Post a Comment