Browser extensions for churnalism.com (UK)

Browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome(/Chromium) to check news articles against press releases in the churnalism.com database.

Shared files

A bunch of files are shared between the firefox and chrome versions. Very often such files consist mainly of browser-neutral code with a couple of browser-specific bits.

Rather than cobble up some clever code-generation system to keep things DRY, I've just gone with having near-duplicate versions of the files for each version. The browser-specific bits are denoted by comment markers.

The sanity-check script checks the shared files, and lets you know if there are any differences other than the comment marker lines.

example (from content.js):

function doHighlight(frags) { ... }
function removeHighlight() { ... }
function extract_article() { ... }

...

/* start CHROME
$( document ).ready( function() {
  var details = extract_article();
  chrome.runtime.sendMessage({'method': 'textExtracted', 'pageDetails': details});
});

chrome.runtime.onMessage.addListener(function(req, sender, sendResponse) {
    // Do something
    //
    switch( req.method) {
      case "highlight":
        doHighlight(req.frags);
        break;
      case "noHighlight":
        removeHighlight();
        break;
    }
});
end CHROME */

/* start FIREFOX */
$( document ).ready( function() {
  var details = extract_article();
  self.port.emit("textExtracted", pageDetails);
});
self.port.on('highlight', function(frags) { doHighlight(frags) });
self.port.on('noHighlight', function() { removeHighlight() });
/* end FIREFOX */

This example is from the firefox version - the chrome section is commented out. The chrome version of the file should be identical, except that the chrome section is enabled and the firefox one commented out.

Caveat: don't use /* ... */ style comments within browser-specific blocks!

Credits

Written by Ben Campbell

Initially based on my unsourced.org browser extension, which in turn pulled bits from Sunlight's own churnalism extension.