make a cool / useful firefox plugin

At last, a comprehensive tutorial on how to make a Firefox extension. I’ve tried this before a few times and never quite got it to work for me.

Watch out Firefox users. All my crazy plans will now come to fruition.

OK, I have a small, doable idea. One that’s related to what I do each and every work day. My idea? Right click on a link and have some substitution take place in the URL string.

Here’s the deal. I do web development for a living. Every day, I get these tickets for changes and improvements to our various web properties. The ticket owner enters the URL of the page on our live web site.

Naturally, we don’t develop on the live server. Here’s where the Firefox extension comes in. I’d like to be able to right click on a link, and have part of the link replaced or extended. This way, I can open links on my dev. box and do my work.

Eventually I’d like to add a an options tab to allow regular expressions (another of my 43 things) to be used.

I’m ready to do this and have most of the product fleshed out on paper and electronically. The issue is that I cannot get the tutorial at roachfiend.com working.

Apparently there’s a new “Firefox Hacks” book coming out from O’Reilly but I’m not sure I should have to spend $30 for a book just to learn to do FF extensions.

Any help?

Ever since I started using OneNote and Firefox I’ve wanted code up an extension like the “OneNote Powertool” that enables me to right click on content in IE and have it get pasted into my OneNote notebook.

The only issue is I don’t really have the time right now to figure out how to right FF extensions.

Nevertheless, here are my the projects on my list:

1) FireFox to OneNote extension.
2) FifeFox javascript extension that allows you to select text in a textare then copy it to the clipboard like execCommand(“copy”) allows you to do in IE. This is clearly a security risk but for intranet purposes this would be handy.
3) FireFox to “MobileFavorites” to add offline content to my PocketPC so I can read stuff when I’m in line or otherwise having my valuable time wasted.

I’ve located a tutorial (http://extensions.roachfiend.com/howto.php) but the whole process needs more documentation and examples. Luckily I know some javascript and .NET coding so items one and three seem doable given the time.