A place for my programming projects and the occasional blog about technology related matters.
Sneak Peek
Source code - addons.mozilla.org page
Sneak Peek is an extension for Mozilla Firefox that allows you to preview information from link targets by hovering over hyperlinks on a webpage. Unlike other preview extensions (Cooliris etc.) the Sneak Peek extension does not show preview on all links, and it does not show a preview of the entire link target page. Instead the extension uses little snippets of code, so-called Sneak Peek Scripts, that define for which pages you want to see a preview, and precisely which part of the link target you want to preview. The extension was built to generalize an old Greasemonkey script I had written, that allowed you to hover over links in the Joel on Software message boards, and see the first post in the thread in a preview box. After getting used to having the functionality on that message board I started missing it on other message boards I use so I created this extension so I could easily create previews for any message board. Although the extension was mainly made to preview posts in message boards it can be used for any case where you want to preview only a specific part of a link target, I use it for example to preview comments on my blog page by hovering over the comments link.
Detailed information about how this works, and how to create scripts can be found in the help file included with the extension and also available here.
Works with: 
Firefox: 3.0 – 3.0.*
Latest version: 0.9.2
Sneak Peek Scripts
CrazyOnTap discussion forums
Joel on Software discussion forums
Mozillazine discussion forums
AddonsMirror discussion forums
mbl.is blog entry preview
RedFlagDeals Forums (by RenegadeX)
Comment
I have a bit of regexp experience but don’t find it easy, and after a dozen or so failed attempts at creating my first SP, and not knowing which of my 3 regex lines were wrong (or if it was all 3!), I eventually got it working. I had thought perhaps I needed to add a regexp to match whatever came after the “.php?” in the URL(such as “searchid=1234″ or “t=54321″), and but eventually came to realize that no, it’s not needed! And for that, I’m glad!!
Then I realized that I often use the ’show new posts’ button on forums rather than visit each subforum individually, so I had to include an either|or exp for the 2 different php files that the forum software uses. Got that working too, but in total it probably took me 20 minutes to make 1 SP script.
A little bit of automation or visual validation during the generating process would definitely help. I resorted to using http://www.regular-expressions.info/javascriptexample.html to test the validity of my expressions, and had to refer to the SP scripts you’ve already posted to find out what I should be looking for for the ‘Peek pattern’.
I also can’t seem to install my SP script via dragging the plain-text text file saved as whatever.sp into my browser. It recognizes that it’s a SP file, but then always gives me a “Failed to download script!” message. I suspected it might be something to do with character encoding, but I’ve tried saving the file in a number of formats (inc UTF-8, w/wo BOM) and no luck. Any idea what could be wrong with it?
–
@@SneakPeek
name : RedFlagDeals Forums
author : RenegadeX
sitePattern : http://www\.redflagdeals\.com/forums/(search\.php|forumdisplay\.php)
linkPattern : http://www\.redflagdeals\.com/forums/showthread\.php\?t=[0-9]+
peekPattern : [^]*?
–
^ oh, my peekPattern apparently got mangled when I hit “Send” just now — apparently WordPad doesn’t like less-than and greater-than signs and disregards whatever is between them.
I’ll just email it to you.
Hi RenegadeX
Nice to know someone is using it
I’ve added a new version, 0.9.2, that works correctly on local files. I thought the old one did already, but testing it after getting your comment I realized that it didn’t work at all.
I couldn’t install the script you sent me, after a while I figured out it was because it was missing the url: line. It’s required to be there, even though you don’t specify any url. The parsing is a bit sensitive
Anyway, I put your script upon my site, giving you credit for it of course, so others can download it.
As for having trouble creating scripts, yes, it can be pretty annoying. Some tips, tricks and future ideas:
* Go to about:config and set extensions.sneakpeek.debug to true. Then you’ll see some debug output in the error console that might help you a little bit, saying how many links were set up with event handlers and so on. I don’t remember exactly how much is printed, it was meant as a debugging aid, not for public use. (In about config you can also mess with the css for the preview if you want).
* Read the help file, available from the help button in the options dialog. It has some tricks (not a lot), such as using [^]*? for content.
* An idea I had was to build some kind of tester. You could enter an example site url and it would tell you something like ‘Site pattern xxx matched
the example url, link pattern found n links on that page that were set up with previews, the first of those gives the following preview: xxxxxx’. So you could build it up gradually, first making sure that the site pattern matched, then checking how many links were matched and finally seeing the content found from the first links’ preview. But that might be a while away, I probably won’t work much on this extension for at least 2-3 weeks.
And if you’re a member at addons.mozilla.org I’d really appreciate if you’d leave a review for the extension
Hi again. I just sent you an email with some ideas, but I thought the following might be useful to share with other users:
In ‘about:config’, I edited my ‘extensions.sneakpeek.previewStyle’ and gave my popup box a different colour(pale yellow), changed the font size, made the box wider, and centred the box on my screen as I noticed that sometimes if my mouse was too far to the right side of the screen, the popup would get cut off.
(My screen’s resolution is 1152×864 so as I made my popup box 650px, I calculated: (screenwidth - boxwidth) / 2 and put the resulting number (251) as a ‘left: ‘ positioning value)
So here’s what I’m currently using:
—
position:absolute! important; left: 251px! important; background-color:#FFFFE1 ! important; border:solid 1px black! important; padding:3px ! important; color:black ! important; width:650px ! important; font-family:Arial, sans-serif ! important; font-size:11px ! important; display:none
—
It’s pretty simple to play around with the various style settings, but I wonder if there is enough interest for a style-picker built in to the Sneak Peek Options (colour palette, font chooser, width changer, re-positioner, - and preview button).
I mentioned it to Einar already, but in my first post I had said using the pipe symbol (shift+backslash) was good because it allowed the Sneak Peek to be applied to various different forum pages that a user might access. However, even easier is a simple wildcard “*” (ex: ..com/forums/*)
Also if anyone has a forum they’d like a script for but doesn’t know how, post here and I’ll see what I can do!
oops.. I just tried installing the code I wrote above on a friend’s computer and noticed that it didn’t work due to an extra space between the ‘left:’ and ‘251px’.
I fixed some other unnecessary spaces in it too: Here, try this:
position:absolute !important; left:251px !important; background-color:#FFFFE1 !important; border:solid 1px black !important; padding:3px !important; color:black !important; width:650px !important; font-family:Arial, sans-serif !important; font-size:11px !important; display:none
How i may contact admin this site? I have a question.
iijiivei
Hello,
SneakPeek is a great tool!
It works nice, especially on well-structured sites.
I was able to program it for fast show of all Job Descriptions from Dice, works like a charm! You just point on a job line and see description body in pop-up window without noise information like headers, adds and so on.
Thank you EINAR!