My First Firefox Extension

Last November, a former co-worker and I began brainstorming for a particular site. This site was intended to give people a way to remember quotes that they heard/read/smelled/absorbed/etc without much effort. Soon thereafter, QuoteBoards.org was born.

The site has been pretty boring until recently, though it has been performing its purpose since its first launch. Up until a couple weeks ago, we only had one truly "faithful" member. This member, dirid51, added quotes to his QuoteBoard regularly. He held the site record of 52 quotes until one day another member (Puck) blew is 52 quotes out of the water with nearly 150 (genuine, I might add) quotes in one day.

I got in touch with Puck, and he shared some invaluable feedback with me concerning QuoteBoards.org. With this feedback, I was able to make several improvements that helped Puck along the way as he added his collection of quotes. Currently, he as 1,002 quotes. Most of these were added within a two or three day window. The reason he's stopped adding quotes is because he's tired of transcribing them from printed documents.

With that in mind, I decided it was finally time to begin working on the Firefox extension that I had originally planned to build for QuoteBoards.org when my co-worker and I were initially brainstorming. The purpose of this extension was to make adding quotes from the Web even easier. So, with a few minutes here and there between laundry and such, I was able to build my very first Firefox extension: Quote Grabber.

Right now, the extension is marked as "experimental" and requires people to log into the Mozilla Add-ons site in order to install and use it. However, if you're feeling adventurous, you can bypass that requirement by installing it directly from QuoteBoards.org. There are also directions for using it there.

I hope that those of you who are reading this find the extension to be beneficial and useful. I had a good time developing it nonetheless.

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