About 5 months ago I made a time-saver Firefox extension called Who Is This Person so after highlighting a name you see on a webpage you can instantly query it against some popular people-oriented web sites. I’m happy to say my 2nd upgrade was approved by Firefox and version 0.9.3 is already available for download or updating. A nice technical upgrade is that it now works for text highlighted in the regular page as well as in text input boxes, meaning you can now type a name in any text entry box and search against it. The other upgrades are it now allows you search against ZoomInfo, MySpace and IMDB, varying the find of people it can match again. So far the the extension has been downloaded 16,376 times, 1,943 in the last week due to the update. Pretty cool.

Building this I’ve learned that anyone writing code to work on top of the Mozilla browser codebase is either a) an origial Mozilla engineer b) extreme patient c) brilliant or d) masochistic. The documentation reads like the Handbook for the Recently Deceased from Bettlejuice and pretty much requires liberating working code from other extensions (extensions are meant to be public code), reading thru the Firefox source code line by line or having the sympathies of those that have. Overall I’ve been able to build my by discerning what others have done, seeking help from the awesome flockstars mailing list and lots of lots patience and trial and error. I would also like to give a special coder shout-out to Soyapi Mumba, a engineer from Malawi (Southwest Africa), who pointed me too his much more elegantly coded extension that allows similar features to mine but for searching against the best search engines. Hi is called SearchWith and I highly recommend it if you’re into this thing.

So far since launch the extension has been downloaded over 13,000 times and I’ve received two dozen thank you notes and I know it’s saved me at least 800 seconds worth of copy and pasting time, opening a new browser window, calling up LinkedIn and doing my search. Heck this sucker may have saved me up to 15 minutes in just 5 months. That’s half an hour of gravy I can enjoy come month twelve ;>