Feedly Background Tabs

June 29th, 2013

Building (almost entirely) upon the excellent work by zakj with the impending Google Reader doom I recreated his Safari extension which opens items in a new background tab to work with Feedly. Simple and (hopefully) useful. Enjoy!

Get it on GitHub


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Comments

Sebastian said:

Love that extension, most important part of Feedly! 😉
Would it be possible though to open the background tab next to the Feedly tab (to the right) instead of opening it all the way down at the right end of the tab bar?

Thanks

Sebastian


michael said:

Sebastian, sad to say Safari doesn’t really let me control where the tab is placed more specifically than in the background. There are some other Safari add-ons that might help such as Glims


Sebastian said:

Hey, thanks for answering the last time, I’m using Glims now and I can at least tweak it a bit better.

I have another little request since Feedly introduced a new feature today where articles are not automatically marked as read anymore while going through them with the short keys n/p. I love this new feature, it would be cool however if articles would be marked as read if I opened them in the background of course. So if your little extension could trigger the short key ‘m’ as well to mark the article as read (only if it’s not marked as read already) when pressing the background tab short key, that would be awesome.

Thanks

Sebastian


michael said:

Sebastian, I actually use j/k for my shortcut keys (didn’t even know there was the n/p option) which does still seem to be marking posts as read as I go through them (which is how I prefer it, personally). I wasn’t certain but I thought from reading the Feedly post that they included an option in settings to let you change the behavior of marking as read with the n/p that would basically give you what you’re looking for. Am I wrong?


Sebastian said:

Yes this is all true but I waited for this feature so long because I was used to it from Google Reader and I always preferred if articles are not immediately being marked as read when I just scroll through them with n/p. I don’t want to use j/p for all articles because there are so many in my list that I only want to read the headlines of most articles and not actually open them.
So I only use j/p when I know I want to open the next article as well, otherwise I always use n/p (Title Only view). That’s why I don’t want to change the behaviour of the n/p keys.

Basically, I rush through my article headlines and if I want to read an article, I hit the short key to open the full article in an background tab thanks to your extension. If I want to read more first because the headline doesn’t say enough, I press ‘o’ to open the article preview. I rarely use j/p at all. And I want to know what articles I actually opened/read and which not. It’s just a nice overview to have and as I said, I’m used to it from Google Reader which I used for years before it shut down.

I know everybody uses Feedly differently but that’s how I use it – so it would be cool if you could add this little feature – please? 🙂


michael said:

Hmm, but the ‘m’ shortcut key just toggles “read” status, meaning that it would incorrectly mark articles that are already read as un-read, since I have no way to detect whether the article is already read. This just seems like a rather specific ‘feature’ to add to what is otherwise a very simple extension, and I’m not even sure it’ll work properly…


Sebastian said:

Well if it’s too difficult, it’s certainly not worth it, I agree. I just thought it might be possible with some simple addition of code but if you can’t detect if an article is already marked as read or not there is no way to make this work properly, I guess.

Btw, sometimes it’s not working, like frozen, I have to reload the Feedly page to wake it up again. Any idea why that is?


michael said:

Yea, sounds like a feature you might want to ask for from Feedly (since they can detect when an article is marked as read). As for the freezing, sounds like a browser issue TBH, I don’t have the same problem nor have I had other reports of it, sorry…


Sebastian said:

They might have changed something in Feedly or it’s down to Safari 8 on Yosemite, but it’s not working anymore. Any ideas?


michael said:

Hey Sebastian, something did change on the freely side. I pushed an update on Monday to fix this, a couple of other people have had trouble auto-updating but removing/re-installing the extension should work. Let me know if not!


Sebastian said:

Yes! Thanks, works like a charm again. Brilliant extension, I’m totally lost without it. 😉


Sebastian said:

Hi Michael, would it be possible to trigger CMD + mouse click on an article link instead of an javascript event? How would I have to change the code to do that?
I just realised that CMD + mouse click works a bit better. It uses blank pages if available for the new background page (your script opens a new tab no matter what) and it opens new tabs right next to Feedly.
In Safari 9 (OS X 10.11), you can have pinned tabs now which means there is a blank page every time you close the last regular tab. It would be nice if that page would be used for background tabs instead of open an new one and leaving a tab unused.

Regards,
Sebastian


michael said:

Hey Sebastian, glad to see you’re still going strong with the plugin! I haven’t installed Safari 9 yet as my dev machine is on the mend but when I do I will take a look at this.

The real problem is that Apple recently changed their developer program to all one package, which means humble Safari devs like myself, who make no money from these projects, would have to pay the yearly fee for a membership. At this point I’m not sure what I’m going to do but Apple have stated Safari 9 will only allow Apple-signed extensions… See more about this here: http://gizmodo.com/apples-great-new-developer-program-screws-over-safari-d-1710539882


Sebastian said:

Yeah I heard about this but as far as I understood this new guideline, extensions outside the program aren’t being updated automatically through Safari anymore but you can still install them so you don’t necessarily take part in the program to offer extensions. People would just have to update these extensions themselves, I guess.

I looked at the code a bit and found online something about jQuery where you can bind key combinations on another key, I just don’t know where/how to implement this in the code so the shortly for the background tab would trigger CMD + mouseup. That would surpass Apples restrictions on where the tab opens because CMD + mouseclick has exactly the behaviour I’m looking for.


Sebastian said:

Just saw that you made an AppStore extension. Great stuff, thanks for that! 🙂




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