My .tel Google Chrome Extension
I mentioned in a previous post that I am planning on pursuing a career as a freelance developer, in order to make this work I need more experience using different technologies and systems so I am currently playing around with a few simple projects including Chrome extensions.
Earlier in the week I took a look at the extensions developer guide and was surprised at how simple making an extension appeared to be, I had been updating my .tel domain the previous day so I cam up with the idea for an extension which would scan a page for a .tel address and display the associated contact information.
I used the Mappy sample extension as a starting point as it offered similar functionality; after getting the code to identify and return a .tel address I moved onto displaying the .tel information.
This was harder than I was expecting, all the contact information associated with a .tel address is stored in its DNS records so it can't just be queried as you would a web service, thankfully Telnic provide some sample code so after spending an evening working with that I came up with a script which would display the contact details when passed a domain name.
At this point it was just a simple case of updating the extension to display the contact information in an iframe and it was done.
My extension can be found here - .tel Info Google Chrome Extension
I will hopefully port this to Firefox soon although there system is a lot more powerful and as a result more complicated.