Chosen for distribution overview

A chrome extension for curated articles

This is one of those projects where 10% of the work takes 90% of the time. It started with a lot of enthusiasm. I got some great early results, but over time I had to slather myself with more and more elbow grease to reach the finish line. Now, I think I am nearly there.

I proudly present my new extension!

After hacking together a small little extension for Medium a little while ago, I was certain I could do something more complex. I didn’t have a goal to write for, however. The publication What’s up M made me realize, that I could do with being able to see exactly which of my stories got distributed. Maybe, as a bonus, I could also write which topic they were distributed in.

While fiddling with developer tools, I figured out this was technically feasible! Below the results of my efforts so far:

I spent most of my time figuring out how my extension could play nicely with the Enhanced Medium Stats extension. I had to make some concessions, but I am happy with the end result. On my machine it works perfectly both with and without that extension running.

As you can see in the screenshot, I made some changes to the stats-page. If a story was chosen for distribution, the tag for which it was chosen shows up in the Distributed-column. Also, you get the count of all Distributed-stories in the summary below the table. Beats the crap out of clicking each article individually, doesn’t it?

Releasing the extension to the chrome webstore

The extension works on Google Chrome and is now nearing completion. I have to clean up some unused code before I can submit it to google. Then it’s just a matter of waiting for people to download the extension. And to receive bug reports, I guess.

I hope the extension will be available tomorrow. I honestly don’t know how long Google takes to review an extension. We’ll see who turns out to be the bottleneck. It could be them, or I can run into yet another problem.

I hope you are as excited about this as I am! I am not sure how many people will actually use the extension, so please let me know if you plan to download it. If you have any suggestions, feedback, or feature requests, please reach out to me. A comment on this article will do just nicely.

I’ll post a new article when I release the extension. In the meantime: keep writing and get those article Chosen for Distribution!

Update: it’s now published. Check it out here: