The Chatterbox

Google Chrome Extensions - Highlight Nofollow Links

For those who hadn't yet noticed, the Chrome team over at Google recently started to allow the use of Extensions for their browser. I caught wind of it while reading recent blog entry over at Matt Cutts' blog. Or if you want the developer info there's a new page up in the Chromium Developers at Google.

As a bit of a warning, this is brand new and is pretty limited at the moment. The main limit being that at this point in time one can only have one extension installed for Chrome. According to what I've read Extensions are available only in the latest versions of the Developer version of Chrome, and possibly the Beta 2 version of the non-developer version. And as of this time they haven't yet made easy use of CSS available via extensions.

FTR, I've been using the Developer version of Chrome for some time now and have never run into any major problems. So even though it's more of a bleeding edge choice, it's not a bad one. If you want or need to upgrade to the Dev version you can do that here.

The One Extension limitation is a serious one for me. I've got a couple of extensions I've gotten used to over the years. The big two for me being an Ad Blocker and having the ability to easily see Nofollow links. Ad Blocking I accomplish via my hosts files, as opposed to doing it with a browser extension. So it's no biggie. I have however missed having the ability to see nofollow's without viewing the source code.

Thankfully, that's now easy. In fact, I didn't even have to write any new code to pull it off. I found I could simply save the javascript for a Greasemonkey highlighter, then let Chrome know where it is via a manifest file. It's easy to do too. Following are the files you need and some quick and dirty instructions, in case you use Chrome and want the ability to see nofollow's.

First, save these two files to your hard drive.
manifest.json
highlight-nofollow.js

Or alternatively you can grab both files in this zip file.

You can put these anywhere on your hard drive. I have chosen to make a new directory at C:\chromeextensions to keep everything orderly. So my instructions will assume you've created a folder of the same name and placed the files in it.

Once you have the two files saved in this new directory it's simply a matter of letting Chrome know the extension is there. You do this by editing the startup instructions for Chrome.

So right click on the Chrome icon on your desktop and go to the Shortcut tab. There you should see something like the following in the Target line.

"C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"

You'll want to add a couple of things to the end of this line to enable extensions and tell Chrome where you've saved them. After editing the above line should look like:

"C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --enable-extensions --load-extension="c:\chromeextensions"

Basically you're adding --enable-extensions to tell Chrome to enable Extensions, the telling Chrome where your extensions are located on your computer with --load-extension="c:\chromeextensions"

That's it, that's all. Click OK to save your changes. Then shut down and restart Chrome and you should have your nofollow highlighter installed and working. It'll automatically put a pink background color behind any links that are nofollow'd on any page you visit in Chrome.

Note: If you changed the c:\chromeextensions path I'm using you'll need to make a quick edit to the Shortcut edit. No other changes should be necessary since I use a referential reference to the javascript file in the manifest.json file.

Enjoy it! And look for more to be coming soon. Since it's so darned easy to port over these extensions I expect they'll be hitting the 'Net pretty quickly, as soon as the Chrome team beefs up the Extensions capabilities of Chrome a bit more.

You can ping this entry by using http://www.randycullom.com/chatterbox/mt-tb.cgi/50 .