Bookmark monitoring Firefox extensions?

February 27, 2006 12:28 PM

I'm looking for a Firefox extension/behavior that will light up my bookmarks in the bookmark toolbar when the pages they represent change.

I have a couple of rows of Firefox bookmark toolbars (nifty trick, see here) and I want an easy way to know when they've updated. Yes, I could and do use RSS, but I want to know at a glance which pages have changed.

I'd love to have an extension or customization that changes the color of the text, or puts a little glow effect on the icon at regular intervals so I can cut down on my mindless clicking.

Not too worried about false positives or anything; it doesn't have to be an exact science. I'm a fairly seasoned extensions user (I use about 20 extensions on a regular basis) but have never come across something like this. Any ideas?

posted by cacophony to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

I would guess that you haven't found such an extension because it would be hard to make it work in any useful way. In a web full of dynamically generated pages, it's not enough to have a simple program that keeps checking for any change in the content.

Take MeFi as an example... even if the front page hasn't changed significantly, there's a timestamp that gets updated on every refresh. Lots of websites have rotating advertisements, and that's enough to muck everything up.
posted by Galvatron at 12:52 PM on February 27, 2006

Response by poster: I agree with your assessment that a simple program wouldn't cut it, but that doesn't make the problem impossible. I think I could present a design that would handle the challenge you've mentioned; but I was hoping someone else had done this already. I unfortunately don't have the resources at this time for the design/development work this would take.
posted by cacophony at 1:14 PM on February 27, 2006

Certainly not impossible. At first thought, "all" you would need an extension to do is tie the check of bookmarks to a particular browser event or timer, query each bookmarked link in turn when the event fires, and then update your Firefox UI. It might be doable as a Grease Monkey script, but I'm not sure you get proper access to the Firefox UI to make the highlighting changes you want, forcing youto go the full extension route. All that's left is to find a suitable volunteer to code it up. Sounds kinda interesting, actually, but I'm busy.

If you want to try yourself, given that support for HTTP headers like Last-Modified isn't universal (and doesn't universally work when it is present), you might be better off tying the check to a simple checksum of basic content. Still, constantly banging on websites to see what's new is one of the things that RSS was supposed to avoid. Trigger a site check too often, and the webmaster could become annoyed and engage in retaliatory measures. Maybe you should stick with the HTTP headers to see when the site was last modified rather than checksumming the site. That, or strictly enforce a time limit between queries which survives and shares across individual browsing sessions.
posted by mdevore at 1:42 PM on February 27, 2006

Do these pages themselves use RSS?
posted by Firas at 2:48 PM on February 27, 2006

Response by poster: Most of them do... do you have a solution that could track the bookmarks changing using the underlying RSS feeds? That could work. I still couldn't find an extension which caused the UI to light up in response to a new RSS item, but then again I'm not too familiar with live bookmarks.
posted by cacophony at 3:19 PM on February 27, 2006

Ah no, unfortunately I'm not aware of any, was just responding to mdevore's comment—there's no need to come up with a 'check if site has changed' solution if the underlying sites provide RSS feeds.
posted by Firas at 5:38 PM on February 27, 2006

The best I've got is Tab Mix Plus which allows to style unread tabs (as well as 'current' tab) but once you select the tab, it doesn't matter if it reloads. It's considered 'read' til you close it.
posted by raaka at 1:12 AM on February 28, 2006