My first Chrome extension(I)

This afternoon I was preparing an interview I expect to have next week, and came to an interesting page with information about job selection process and companies inside information. However, after surfing a bit, the inevitable, “become a registered member” started to bug me.

And I got tired.

And I remembered FT similar “become a registered” and WSJ “first-paragraph-only”. Lots of sites show you the page when you come from Google, but ask you to register if you start to surf (or just come from a different page). Completely understandable, but not very pleasant.

So I asked myself if it would be too complicated to build an extension for Google Chrome, that when you are at a page and asks to register, you ask google to get redirected to that page. It seems it’s not. I started poking at 19:00 (local development folder creation time was 19:07) and ended building it at 20:30 (icon included). It’s pretty basic, but it makes a bit of tweaking with FT and WSJ URLs because just coming from Google was not enough. And now it works, with glassdoor, FT, and WSJ.

Great. I learnt and I have something interesting to show.

In the future.

Maybe showing I’m willing to “hack” a paywall is not something I should be publishing when interviewing for a financial information company. Or maybe yes. Anyway: this is me.

Next post. How I did it.