avatarMartin van Soest

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Medium Tools — Chrome extension

Yet Another Medium Extension?

Because more is better, right?

Time to think. Should I fight harder or smarter? Boxer photo created by drobotdean — www.freepik.com

A couple of days ago I have written a story about some exciting new features coming to the Medium Earnings Extension. For those who missed it, it is right here.

The story is meant to gather feedback on how to progress with the extension. This post is more or less similar: which extension(s) do you want? The last paragraph present you with some choices. You can decide to skip the background and go right to the poll, but I think you’d best learn about why there is choice first.

Some background

In the story above, I have said the extension currently only runs on my machine. Before I throw a release-party, it would be nice to know that everyone can benefit from it.

So, yesterday Anthony Lawrence (Pcunix) and I sat together to pinpoint why the extension didn’t act properly on his machine.

Anthony is quite a prolific writer and has been on Medium for quite some time. I can only dream of the number of stories he has written. Also, some of his stories have been very succesful as well. Be sure to check out his profile. You’ll probably find something that interests you.

To cut a long story short: our testing was smooth. We found the culprit soon and managed to find out who to blame soon.

Spoiler: it was me.

A little surprise did come up: it wasn’t the Earnings-extension that caused failure. It was actually my other extension, Medium Distribution Info.

Remember Anthony has published a lot of stories on Medium? The latter extension is not optimized at all. It tried fetching data for all the stories; the additional request by the earnings extension apparently meant we crossed some treshold at Medium’s server who subsequently blocked access.

Result: neither extension showed anything on the stats-page.

What’s this talk about another extension then?

So, to release the next version of the Earnings extension, I also need to push a new optimized release for the Distribution extension. And since my time is limited, I am not really looking forward to it.

There is an alternative, obviously. In fact, it has been suggested by a couple of people already: create One Extension To Rule Them All.

I must admit I have been considering this for a while now. Maintaining three codebases (although I don’t think I ever released more than one version of the Scheduled extension) is not that bad. But… I like the code of Earnings a lot better.

Creating a new extension will require a lot of work now, but possibly saves me work in the future. That is, if I drop support for the standalone extensions.

I won’t go into details on why I originally chose to create three extensions. Those reasons are still valid, but there’s a new kid on the block: possible failure if I continue like this.

I need your help, please vote

Thank you for reading this far. Your thoughts on this matter to me. I present you with a couple of choices.

  1. Create a new extension with the functionality of all three extensions (Distribution, Earnings and Schedule). Also, let go of the stand alone versions.
  2. Keep three separate extensions and have them play together nicely.
  3. (Force the users that experience trouble to choose to enable only one extension, effectively working around possible problems).

I don’t really consider #3. I want stuff to work and I want it to be good out of the box. No surprises later.

Please comment on what your choice would be. And, if possible, tell me why.

Oh, and while you’re commenting, I have another request:

If you were to name such an extension, what would it be called?

As always, thank you for reading. And thanks for hitting that comment-button! Stay awesome!

Chrome Extension
Earnings
Distribution
Curation
Debates Deciphers
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