The world (and word) of jaymz

I have been coding in java for about a week now (when I’m not coding in Python of course) and I fancied a break away from it. I’m not entirely sure why but I decided to take a look at coding chrome extensions. These are in fact very, very easy to make. The tube status thing below took me just over an hour to get how I wanted. If you’re running chrome you can get the installer here. I think I’ll do some more work on it to add customization – that was my initial motivation to do this, the first one I installed from the current extension gallery just showed the little panel of status’ from the site and I wanted to just pick a few lines & tweak the output.

In the end it’s easier to just code my own. It makes use of the excellent REST api provided by Ben Dodson. Creating such an extension is trivial. You can make your life a bit easier if you just include jquery from the google ajax api’s. Then its really just a collection of a few html files (in this case just the one popup.html). All my HTML is doing is making an AJAX request for the JSON data from Ben’s api. That comes back and it simply renders out a few div’s with the colors set and based on the status a unicode entity to add some fun to it.

The method of making extensions on chrome really is a breeze and the documentation is plentiful, so hats off to google yet again for making me happy to be an open source, linux loving  developer. The extension is now in the chrome gallery and available here.

jaymzcd@googlemail.com