What Happened Today?
Saturday, February 20, 2021.
Today we discovered an issue with our extension. It did not work.
When downloaded from the chrome store, our extension did not work as it did when we tested it and it also did not show the appropriate icon on the toolbar. Clearly, these were issues that we needed to resolve.
Upon analyzing the problem of our extension not working as expected, we discovered that there was a change in LinkedIn’s code we used to block the news feed. As a result, we revised our extension to block the news feed using a different approach. We also took the opportunity to adjust our extension to enable toggling the feed on and off by clicking the app. Now that we’ve resolved that problem, we went on to fix the app icon not showing up.
It appears we might have placed the icon in the wrong location, but it was not immediately clear to us why this happened. Apparently, Google has also released a newer version of their Manifest — Manifest version 3. We thought this might be why the app icon was not showing up but that should not be the case because app icons in version 2 appear, so that can not be the reason. However, we would have to upgrade our extension to use the new version in the future.
After resolving both issues, and testing them on our systems, we updated our app description to incorporate the new functionality, included a link to the feedblocker.com website and resubmitted it to the chrome store.
In other news, we signed up for a new mail today — feedblocker@gmail.com. Yes, this is a Gmail account. Given we bought the feedblocker domain last week, we could have created an @feeblocker.com email but we decided to go with Gmail because we are not ready to pay monthly fees to host a business email on Google.
Finally, after spending 2 hours on the issue resolution, we tried to see if could create a website placeholder website in 30 minutes. We decided to go with the gatsby framework but realized we want to take a bit more time to be thoughtful with our design and creation with the site — even if will just be a placeholder for now.
Things are getting are slightly more challenging now but we are happy to keep going.