LinkThing can't exclude websites?

[Cowicide]

Under settings for current site I don't see an option to turn off LinkThing entirely for the specific website.  Is this option somewhere I’m not looking?  Seems like a white/black list is really important to make this practical for everyday use.

[Chul Kim]

Hi,

It's actually never come up before. Is there a site that is giving you problems even when you set both onsite and offsite links to "(Let the site decide)"?

Also, are you using LinkThing2 or the legacy version? LinkThing2 should be more compatible with unusual sites.

Thanks,

Chul

[Cowicide]

It's the latest version 2.1.3.

It's just a hassle with some sites that use a lot of javascript with dealing with displaying images in tabs the way I'd like, etc. - I would just prefer to turn off LinkThing entirely for those websites.

But the main thing is that there's times when I'm doing development work and I don't want my linking behaviors altered at all and definitely would value being able to turn off LinkThing for those specific sites I'm developing/testing instead of having to disable LinkThing entirely.  Especially because I still will want to use LinkThing with other sites while I'm doing the development work at the same time.

Extensions like ClickToFlash and AdBlock have these white/black lists as well and some even let you edit them yourself.  It's kind of win-win where the developer doesn't have to worry about every single custom configuration while giving the user what she wants.  ^_^

[Chul Kim]

Okay. I'll see about adding a blacklist UI to the next version.

Chul

[Chul Kim]

Hi,

This build of LinkThing, not yet released, implements a blacklist UI. Please try it out and let me know if you encounter any problems.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23990/Canisbos/LinkThing_2.1.4.safariextz

The blacklist editor is on the third tab of the settings box. Each line in the textarea is treated as a regular expression against which to test URLs as they are opened. If the URL matches one of the expressions, LinkThing will almost entirely disable itself on the page. (The only things that are not disabled are: the context menu item to open LinkThing settings and a click handler that closes the settings box when you click outside it.) Changes take effect as soon as you leave the textarea.

Regards,

Chul

[Cowicide]

Thanks for letting me try this out!  :)

It works, but I did notice something.  Where are "settings for current site" stored at?  I could see where some people might want to delete those for privacy purposes, especially some of my friends in China.  Also, I figure over time that could get huge if it's saving for each and every site you go to (whether you make custom settings or not?  I'm not clear on this...) and some might want to clear it out to speed up things down the road?

And one last thing, I understand regex and was able to also blacklist subdomains (etc.) like this:

^https?([^.]+)\.example\.com

But I think the average user would struggle with this so you might want to include examples of that as well since it's a fairly common thing people may run into?  Or better yet, have an option to do that with a checkbox?

Thanks again! -Cow

[Chul Kim]

Hi,

The site settings are stored in Safari's preferences file, ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.plist. If one wants to delete these site settings without trashing the whole prefs file, one can open the file in Xcode or another binary plist editor and delete the key ExtensionSettings-com.canisbos.linkthing-ZANVZTSER6, or just the specialSites subkey within it.

Ideally, I should add a UI for deleting individual site settings. But I just don't want to deal with it. Note that the extension does not create an entry for every site you visit, just the ones you create special settings for.

Regarding the blacklist, I expect non-technical users to enter URL fragments, like "google.com". Treated as a regex, such a string will match what the user wants, most of the time. As with the other thing, I just don't feel like putting in the effort to add a checkbox to toggle between plain-string and regex matching. If people start complaining, I'll rethink this.

Regards,

Chul

[Chul Kim]

Oh, I forgot to thank you for testing. Thank you!

Chul

[Cowicide]

Hi, I edited the specialSites subkey (cleared it out) and then the LinkThing preferences only showed a grey screen and nothing else.  So I then deleted the entire ExtensionSettings-com.canisbos.linkthing-ZANVZTSER6 key and it was still only showing a grey screen.  So I had to uninstall LinkThing and then reinstall it entirely for it to work again.  I used PlistEdit Pro to edit the plist.

Can you give me a more detailed process in how I can edit the plist without this happening again?  Thanks.

[Cowicide]

Nevermind, I think I just forgot to leave a [] in place after I cleared out the specialSites subkey.  At least I think that was what the issue was.

[Chul Kim]

Hi,

You're right. The extension expects specialSites to be an array. I should not have advised you to simply delete the key.

If you just delete the entire ExtensionSettings-com.canisbos.linkthing-ZANVZTSER6 key (making sure to quit Safari first) and then restart Safari, it will be fine. I just tried that myself.

Regards,

Chul