Unofficial Tek Syndicate Forum Extension for Google Chrome
So I was on YouTube reading through the terrible, terrible comments there and wished I could be super lazy and have the comments from the Tek Syndicate forum right under my video, so I wrote this extension to do just that, put the forum comments under any Tek Syndicate video.
Good question. Right now, not very well. It exploits quite a few bugs and does stuff a very roundabout way to get past cross-origin rules regarding direct HTTP requests from JavaScript and iframes. Here's a very brief breakdown of what it does at the moment:
Checks that this is a Youtube page.
Injects Javascript into the page
Finds the channel ID of the author on the page to make sure it's a Tek Syndicate video
Kills the YouTube comments.
Scans through the channel description to find the link to the video page on teksyndicate.com
Loads that page in a new window, trying to hide the window from view
Injects more Javascript into that page
Once the page has loaded, the Javascript gets the iframe, which contains the forum comments.
It then pulls the link the iframe is pointing to, and rewrites the entire page to the contents of the iframe.
The JavaScript then calls the extension with all of the new rewritten HTML and closes the window.
The extension finally writes all of the HTML it got to a new div where the YouTube comments would be.
As you can probably tell, this is super hacky. Because of how script-kiddish this is, there are some bugs/issues right now:
The code is super stitched together, and not finished.
A window has to open in the background, which is super annoying.
The Tek Syndicate button at the top doesn't do anything right now.
Basically the entire thing will need recoding sometime in the future, this is more a proof of concept rather than early access ;)
@wendell If it's not too much of a security concern, modifying your cross origin policies would be a great help to this project and simplify things a lot.
I don't see the advantage of staying in youtube. If I were making this extension I would just make it redirect the youtube page to the corresponding post in teksyndicate.com. So that when I click on a teksyndicate video in my subscription feed in youtube I get redirected to the post. From a practical perspective it's a much simpler solution but I see how your's can be more appealing.
two requests 1) open source it on github (link plz) and 2) rewrite links to amazon/etc with our affiliate code. note that you need to do some work to figure out where the user is (probably their codepage) to know to send them to amazon jp, eu, us, etc. ?
thanks!
ps. I will look into allowing youtube cors but there are security implications and there have been a lot of other folks that have tried to do bad things that our cors policy has stopped.
Hey that's me! I'm PixelPrimer woot. xD This looks awesome but I also agree @holbot I don't usually watch Tek Syndicate videos on YouTube. I always click to go to their website, so a redirect option would be amazing!
P.S. Please give firefox some love, I love the idea of this addon
Sure, a redirect option looks like it's definitely going to be a thing once this project gets a bit more stable. Firefox will also receive some love once the Chrome version is considered stable enough to be usable :)
Okay, this is going to be an opt-in feature though, just in case users want to support someone else or for whatever reason don't want to support anybody.
This extension will probably do other stuff in the future too such as add Tek Syndicate affiliate codes to Amazon links. It also has the raze the world symbol up in the top right which looks really cool imo.
It's not stable yet, but if you download the stuff on the GitHub repo, go to chrome:extensions in Chrome, turn on developer mode with the checkbox and then click "load unpacked extension" you can test it out.
Again, it's not stable. The reason its not working is because of three problems:
The Tek Syndicate Hardware channel wasn't in the list of Tek Syndicate channels until just a few minutes ago (I saw this video and realised I had only included the main channel in the array)
You hadn't refreshed the page after you loaded the page. Because of the way Youtube kinda soft-loads pages using some Javascript I haven't looked into yet, I can't clearly detect the page load in the extension unless you refresh the page after it's loaded initially.
There is no link to the video page in the description, which is required for the extension to work. @wendell, @Logan or another member of Tek Syndicate would need to include the teksyndicate.com/video/... link in the description for it to work.
