Clay

I am Clay who is the main writer for this website. I own a small web hosting company in Malaysia and i'm available to be hired as individual contractor on elance or odesk. You can find me on twitter.

Sending data from background.html to popup display in Google Chrome Extension

You are trying to send data from your background.html back to your popup display in your google chrome extension. However, all you read was sending using message in google chrome to initial a one way message from your background.html to your content_script.js. But you do not understand why they are using a "tabs" api instead of extensions since you are still talking to your extension instead of the page itself.

Well, you are not wrong here to question the answer given from your result. The reason being is that you do not need to send data from background.html to your popup display. The reason is pretty simple, they are not separated. However, you do not know how to update the popup display when you get the data on your background.html. I believe the issue is similar to the one i previously written. You do not need that additional background.html if you are going to update your popup display and not working with other extension. All you have to do is write all your listener (assuming content_script is firing up to the extension) to your popup display. And you should get all you want in popup display without getting all headache about background.html not working etc. Hence,

  1. Copy all your background.html code into popup display
  2. Remove background.html entirely on manifest.json
  3. Now try to update like a normal page on your popup display
And it should do the trick. Hope it helps 🙂

How to get Popup and onClick work together on Google Chrome Extension

Firstly, if you try to use a popup in your manifest.json and find out that your chrome broweraction onclick listener doesn't seems to work. You are in the right place then. And if you read properly on Google Chrome Extension API page, the following onclick will not work properly with popup if you have define it on your manifest.json file.

chrome.browserAction.onClicked.addListener(function(Tab tab) {...});

Fired when a browser action icon is clicked. This event will not fire if the browser action has a popup.

Well, i have another solution for you if you want both popup and onclick on Google Chrome extension to work together.

Popup and onclick working together on Google Chrome extension

Here is probably what you are doing. You are most likely placing your onclick event handler on your background.html file and awaiting for click of your chrome extension to do something within the onclick. And maybe sending them to your popup display. You soon realize that if the popup options is set on your manifest, your onclick won't work. Now, in order to make everything work, just use the popup instead of both as popup will overwrite the onclick event handler and you want the display to be out. What you should do is to paste the code from your background.html to your popup as you shouldn't have the need for a background.html as you are not communicating with many extension. Therefore, you should really either use popup or an onclick but not both 🙂

You might have guess, i was the dumb one here who did the above and realize i'm dumb. *shy* . hahaha. Hope it helps 🙂

25 Google Chrome Extension For Web Developer and Designer

Firefox is really good web development tool for both web developer and designer for many years. However, it is getting slower and utilize a lot of resources which can be as much as 2GB on my laptop which really doesn't seems to justify. The best alternative i am looking at? Chrome. (DEFINITELY NOT IE ! RAGE!) Here are 25 Google Chrome extension that every web developer and designer will definitely be interested to have.

WhatFont

What is the easiest way to find out the fonts used in a webpage? Firebug and Webkit Inspector are easy enough to use for developers. However, for others, this should not be necessary. With this extension, you could inspect web fonts by just hovering on them. It is that simple and elegant.

It also detects the services used for serving the web fonts. Supports Typekit and Google Font API.

Even web developers and designers will shout "YEAH!" with this extension.

Pretty Beautiful Javascript


Automatically makes Javascript files you come across on the net look great! Combines both Beautifier (http://jsbeautifier.org/) and Prettify (http://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/) to unpack/unobfuscate, format, and add syntax highlighting. No need for copy/pasting or anything else it all happens on the fly for your convenience.

PHP Ninja Manual

With PHP Ninja Manual you can search easily and very quickly in PHP 5.3 documentation in 7 languages. Speed is everything we want in web development.

CoNetServ (Complex Network Services)

Extension that integrates network tools into the browser. I find it pretty useful for both network and web developer to know their server well.

jQuery API Browser

Simple extension for jQuery developers that allows quickly search through API documentation. Web developers and designers who uses jQuery surely find this valuable.

Speed Tracer


Speed Tracer is a tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications. It visualizes metrics that are taken from low level instrumentation points inside of the browser and analyzes them as your application runs.

Chrome Sniffer

 

This extension will help web developer to inspect web framework / CMS and javascript library running on current browsing website. An icon will appear on address bar indicates the detected framework. Version detecting is being implemented. One of the most interesting thing a web developer will want to know.

Edit This Cookie


Edit This Cookie is a cookie manager. You can add, delete, edit, search, protect and block cookies!

IE Tab (Windows)


It exactly emulates IE by using the IE rendering engine directly within Chrome. This will enable you to use ActiveX controls and test your web pages with different versions of IE (IE6, IE7, IE8, or IE9). Any web developers and web designers will definitely want a Chrome plugin that can assist you will cross browser issues.

Awesome Screenshot: Capture & Annotate

Capture the whole page or any portion, annotate it with rectangles, circles, arrows, lines and text, blur sensitive info, one-click. One of the easiest and most powerful screen capture apps on Chrome. For both web developer and designe will definitely want this on your Chrome so that you can explain to your client more clearly on what are you referring on the site. Picture speaks a thousand words.

Firebug Lite for Google Chrome


Firebug Lite is not a substitute for Firebug, or Chrome Developer Tools. It is a tool to be used in conjunction with these tools. Firebug Lite provides the rich visual representation we are used to see in Firebug when it comes to HTML elements, DOM elements, and Box Model shading. It provides also some cool features like inspecting HTML elemements with your mouse, and live editing CSS properties.

However, for web developer who is using this you might face problems as not all features are available on a lite version. Here are some of it which you might want to take note of.

  • Cannot read external resources
  • Won't work well on pages with frames
  • JavaScript debugger isn't available
  • Net Panel isn't available

Web Developer

The Web Developer extension adds a toolbar button to the browser with various web developer tools. This is the official port of the popular Web Developer extension for Firefox written by the same person and best of all, we will be enjoying it on Chrome!

speedtest.net

Sometimes things doesn't go well and you will start wondering whether its your internet connection issue. Test it on your Chrome straight away!

Resolution Test


Resolution Test changes the size of the browser window for developers to preview their websites in different screen resolutions. It includes a list of commonly used resolutions and the ability to customise that list. It also gives users the option to turn on Google Browser Size. Something web developers and designers won't want to miss.

Pendule


Pendule extended web developer tools for Chrome. It gives you more features for both web developer and designers could ever think of. Something similar to web developer tool above but built within Chrome developer tool.

Lorem Ipsum Generator


Both web developer and designer will appreciate this Chrome extension whenever they want to test a particular form or just throw some text into a design.

Click&Clean (Windows)


For windows user, you are in luck. Click & Clean is something you want to have on your list, especially web developers. Just think of all the clearing of cache makes me headache but that's not all this Chrome extension do.

  • Scan your PC for Malware
  • Delete your browsing history,
  • Remove download history,
  • Erase temporary files,
  • Clear cookies and Empty cache,
  • Delete client-side Web SQL Databases
  • Remove Flash Cookies (LSOs)
  • Protect your privacy by cleaning up all traces of your internet activity,
  • Clean up your hard drives and Free up more disk space, icluding secure file deletion using external applications, like CCleaner or Wise Disk Cleaner.
  • Watch flash videos offline, without being connected to the Internet!

Web Edit


Just press F12 on any http:// webpage, and edit text and delete things like photos, and embed elements. You can even delete a YouTube video off a page! Once you've had your fun, just press F2 to turn off edit mode, for a convincing looking defaced webpage. Web designers will definitely find this useful infront of your client.

Eye Dropper


Eye Dropper is extension for Google Chrome and Chromium. It allows you to pick color from any webpage or from advanced color picker. It is great tool for web developers.

YSlow

YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. It offers suggestions for improving the page's performance, summarizes the page's components, displays statistics about the page. bla bla bla.. i bet most web developers know more than i do.

IP Address and Domain Information


Web developers and designers often have to assist their client with domain stuff. Whois.is is probably somewhere we always visit. Before even going to google, this might just tells us more about our client before approaching them.

Session Buddy


Web developers will find this pretty handle. Session Buddy is a flexible session management extension that allows you to easily save, edit, and restore your browser sessions.

SEO SERP


A simple tool to quickly check the position of a list of sites given a keyword.
For example, on the sample image you can see Wikipedia ranking #1 and Amazon ranking #18 for the keyword "lcd".

SEO SERP Workbench


A tool to quickly check the position of multiple sites (yours and your competitors) given a keyword. Many countries are supported. Web developers like me will definitely welcome such extension on my Chrome.

HTML5 Pointers!


A HTML5 Collection resources for those of you who wish to know more about html5 and wanted to try out the power of html5.

How to duplicate database record in Yii with 1 line

Well this will be quick since Yii is so powerful in their active record implementation. In Yii, if you ever want to duplicate a database record, all you have to do is to issue the following line.

$model = $this->loadModel($id); // record that we want to duplicate
$mode->id = null;
$model->isNewRecord = true;
if($model->save()){
//duplicated
}

The above implementation is pretty straight forward, we load the database record into a variable called model and set its primary key to null. Next, we set the variable isNewReocord to true and save the model. Once the model is saved, you will get yourself a new duplicated data where the Id is different from the one you just loaded. (well, there's more than 1 line but the key word to this is isNewRecord =x)

How to enable gzip on your cpanel shared hosting

I've explained how to install memcache, htmltidy and csstidy on your centos machine. However,  the most important thing that every webmaster should know and enable would be your gzip. By default, cpanel did not enable gzip for you. You will have to access your cpanel to enable gzip yourself. This can significantly increase your website speed and its a must to do list if you are a webmaster. In order to enable your gzip, you will have to access your cpanel. Once you are in your cpanel, find the following icon.

and click on the following option.

And click update. It is that simple to enable gzip for your shared hosting and speed up your website!