Safari Extensions Fix
An apology and a fix. When OS X updated to 10.7.3 a couple weeks ago, Safari was also updated to 5.1.3. Something about that update caused a small bug with one of my Safari extensions, InstapaperIt, where the toolbar button icons got real small. When I went to fix that bug, I discovered that back when I updated to Lion (haven’t worked on the extensions since then) I lost my Safari Developer Certificate; which signs all my extensions, and which Safari requires (as a security measure). Without the certificate, I couldn’t update any extensions.
I did the wrong thing in trying to re-install my certificate, and actually revoked it instead. This caused ALL my Safari extensions to break. And uninstall themselves automatically the next time a user launched Safari.
What a cluster-f$@#k.
Anyhow. I apologize for any confusion, annoyance, and the general screw up. Will try to avoid such pitfalls in the future.
I have installed a Safari Developer Certificate. I have recompiled my extensions. They should work. I also fixed the toolbar icon for InstapaperIt. You can download them below.
One quick caveat. Safari extensions have a built in auto-update mechanism. In a world where I didn’t revoke my certificate I could just release the updated extension and Safari would help you update it. Since I revoked the certificate, Safari probably uninstalled the extension, so there’s nothing to update. If somehow that didn’t happen, Safari might auto-update the extension. It might not. Uncharted waters. If you have any of my extensions still installed and can’t seem to update them, uninstall them and use the download links below.
p.s. If you’re just learning about my extensions now, you can read about the Instapaper related extensions here, and nvIt here.
InstapaperIt Safari extension users: if you updated to Safari 5.1 you need to re-enter Instapaper credentials in Preferences
If you updated to Safari 5.1 InstapaperIt might have stop working correctly for you.
When Safari updated to 5.1 it lost some of your extension settings. This includes your Instapaper login credentials you have to enter into InstapaperIt’s preferences.
To fix:
- Go to Safari’s Preferences
- Click on the Extensions tab,
- Click on the InstapaperIt extension.
- Re-enter your username/password.
- Reload any pages currently open in Safari (so they reload the extension)
Q&A:InstapaperIt-generated Titles
Q: Would it be possible to add a preference to InstapaperIt, which gives saved articles a title generated from the linked page, rather than the text of the link? A lot of times, I use want to read articles later that are linked in-line with text like “here” and other generally bewildering captions when they’re used as titles in Instapaper. Thanks.
A: I’ll work on it. Instapaper’s API has a built-in auto-titler, which InstapaperIt does use, but not always. It is a toss-up when you compare the results of just using the link text vs using the Instapaper API’s auto-titler. Half the time one of them works better, and vice-versa. Maybe its 60-40. The Instapaper auto-titler is terrible with NYTimes links, for example. And the problem is that if I choose to use the auto-titler, I won’t know what it comes up with until its too late (the article’s already been sent).
Writing my own auto-titler is not in the scope of an extension (a client-side script), it needs a server-side element to crawl that link and then decide which to use.
Maybe I’ll just switch back to the auto-titler and harass Marco to improve things…
