Chrome Feature: Copy as cURL

I surprised someone with my leet skills the other with this technique, so I thought I’d share it on the blog in case anyone else hadn’t seen it – I use it ALL the time :) Chrome has a feature which allows you to copy a web request as a curl request, so you see all the various elements of the request on the command line. Continue reading

Unpacking and Editing a Chrome Extension

I’ve been having an issue with one of my chrome extensions recently – the keyboard navigation extension that I blogged about previously. This is a huge problem for me because without this extension, I can’t “click” on anything on the internet! It was working on some pages, but on others it was drawing elements but not styling them correctly. The extension doesn’t seem to be actively maintained, so I realised I was going to have to dive into the extension itself to understand the problems and have any chance of fixing it. Hurrah for open source software (not that I really write any js but I figured if I could understand the problem, maybe I could ask more intelligent questions) Continue reading

How the Web Looks to Me

It feels like I’ve tried to field the question about how I can use the web without using a mouse (or trackpad or equivalent), without “pointing”, multiple times in the last couple of weeks. The answer is quite visual so I thought I’d share. This is how the web looks to me:

I navigate the web using the Keyboard Navigation extension in Google Chrome, which is what is adding all the little labels you see in the screenshot above. Install the extension, and press comma. The labels will pop up, then you type whichever character(s) show next to the thing you want to “click” on, and off you go.

It’s super-simple, and easier to use than I expected. Why don’t you try it out on your own sites? You’ll get a sense of how the web looks from where I’m standing :)

Adding Custom Headers to Every Request with Chrome

I’m working on an API which uses OAuth2, but it also has an HTML output handler so I actually do quite a lot of my development in the browser for read-only stuff (I wrote an earlier article about output handlers including the HTML output handler). I fell across an extension for Chrome called ModHeader (WTF kind of URL is that, google?) which does this trick for me!

Once I have the access token, I add the Authorization header using ModHeader and it sends it on all requests to this API, so I can still use my HTML output handler and be logged in. It’s useful for sending custom headers of all kinds for different tools, so I thought I’d mention it!