Name: 140 Characters Conference – Twitter
Author: Sara Streeter
Author URL: http://www.sarastreeter.com
sitePattern : ^http://www\.140conf\.com.*
linkPattern : ^http://twitter.com/\w+
peekPattern : <ol class=”statuses”[^]*?</ol>

I tried to get previews of content divs in websites as well, but couldn’t manage to make a generic enough regex that would still load quickly. The twitter works very well though – thanks so much!

Sara

I’m generally familiar with regEx but am no expert and can’t seem to figure it out. Thanks!

Anyway to keep it up and not just on mouse over?

John

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!

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

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!

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

I’ll just email it to you.