Image by hansdorsch via Flickr
In previous posts, I've mentioned instaright. While then, it was in developing stages and reached only some of milestones. But, users warmly accepted service, especially Kindle users. Then I got first reviews and pending feature requests. While developing requested features, I realized that above all stability and scalability of service is a must. So, moving Instaright backend to GAE, was natural choice, since first 5 millions requests are free and service was not build to create money. Simply, it helps users while surfing. That's how 0.3 was born. Version 0.3.1 was created according AMO crew suggestions, since it saw potential global variable issue. Afterwards, I nominated Instaright for Public and its moved from Sandbox to Public within seven days. I'd like to thank AMO team for very fast response, since I nominated addon for first time and which was opposite to comments I found across net.
This is a milestone! It gives me drive to move forward into more ambitious project. One of pending projects got its shape while writing this post.
This is good, but it could be better. In Firefox when you right-click on a link, you get a context menu with the "Instapaper it" button, which if selected will push the linked page to Instapaper. If, however, your mouse pointer is not on a link, and you right-click you still get a context menu with the "Instapaper it" button present, which if selected will return an error message stating "the element is not a link". You should detect whether the mouse pointer is over a link or not, and if not, at the very least do not put the "Instapaper it" button in the context menu (please note that in Firefox the context menus that you get when the mouse pointer is over a link is different from the context menu you get when the mouse pointer is not over a link). A better approach, however, would be to leave the "Instapaper it" button on the non-link context menu, and change its behavior as follows: if there are items on the page selected(with the mouse), then push those selected items to Instapaper, if no items are selected (and the mouse pointer is not on a link) then push the whole page to Instapaper (this will duplicate the function of the "Read Later" bookmarklet, and eliminate its necessity --good for folks who do not want to have the bookmark bar on their screen. The addition of the ability to push only the selected portion of a webpage to Instapaper would be a big win for those complex webpages that the normal Instapaper page interpreter can not correctly handle. (lots of blog pages with ads fall into this category)
ReplyDeleteHi Ed,
ReplyDeletethat's an awesome insight. Looks like proper way to do it.
Keep it coming!