Ruby Slippers

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  Title card

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  Before clicking the slipper icon

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  After clicking the slipper icon

Inspiration

I love browsing sites like reddit and stackoverflow, but I hate having to scroll to the top of the page to go home, especially on big articles or on sites that don't have a home button. With Ruby Slippers, you can quickly and easily go to the homepage of most websites with one click.

What it does

Ruby Slippers goes to the top-level domain of the page you are currently on. For example, if you are on this Amazon listing, Ruby Slippers would take you to the Amazon homepage.

How I built it

Originally, I was writing a script that would return Reddit posts related to the page you were currently on. I was able to parse the URL correctly, but I was having problems trying to render the Reddit embeddable widget in my extension. I eventually abandoned the idea and reformatted my URL parsing code into Ruby Slippers.

Challenges I ran into

Prior to working on Ruby Slippers, the aforementioned script (called "Is This On Reddit?") was intended to run in an iframe element within a popup. I quickly learned that Chrome extensions do not have support for this due to security reasons, and it was difficult to render the Reddit posts from either JSON or the Reddit widget. I eventually decided to use the code that I had which worked, and changed the focus of my extension.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This is my first hackathon! I was able to get a Chrome extension up and running.

What I learned

I learned how to make a Chrome extension from scratch, as well as how to parse JSON data and how to work with HTML and CSS.

What's next for Ruby Slippers

I will keep on trying until I manage to make the Reddit bot that I set out to make!

Built With

• javascript