Monday, November 10, 2008

Announcing CR Companion

CR Companion is a Firefox extension designed to help manage the ever increasing traffic in the comments section of Calculated Risk.



With it you can see who's posting, rate authors, and show only posts matching your ratings. You can also show only posts containing links, or posts containing specific text.


By clicking on an author's name, you can move to their closest post (backwards, if you hold the shift key down). This is convenient for seeing the posts of your favorite authors when you're in a hurry, and also provides a way to navigate back to a referenced post.



In addition, CR Companion includes the Mortgage Pig New Post Notifier (MPNPN). The MPNPN diligently scans the CR post horizon so you don’t have to. You’ll never have your genius ignored on a stale thread again, and you just might get there before Nemo.


I wrote CR Companion when the traffic on Calculated Risk began to spike, and other areas of my life suffered trying to keep up. I offer it to all of you as my small contribution to what has been a source of great solace, humor, and learning. I hope you find it useful.


To try it out, go to its page on the Firefox extension site. You'll see the following dimmed button:



CRC is in sandbox ("experimental") mode, which means it hasn't been extensively tested or reviewed. I’ve been using it for a bit on Firefox 3.03, and no longer see any obvious bugs, but YMMV. Because of this, for now you'll need to create a basic account on the Firefox site before downloading. Sorry for this inconvenience. As soon as (if?) CRC receives some positive feedback, it will get out of sandbox jail, and this won't be necessary.


Click on Log in, and follow the directions on creating a new account.


Once you've installed it and restarted Firefox, CRC's side panel should show up whenever a CR comments page appears, either in a tab or its own window.


Let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions or bug reports.


Happy browsing!

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nemo!

Anonymous said...

Unable to install. Getting hash file error

Unknown said...

Error reads:

Firefox could not install the file at ...
because: Invalid file hash (possible download corruption) -261

Anonymous said...

File hash error here too, on Ubuntu 8.10

nades said...

Ken,

thanks for setting this up!

/////

On a side note I think calling "nemo" is a f'in riot! I want to see people do it on other blogs! Good work bellinghamster ;)

Unknown said...

Ken, Clueless here

Unknown said...

Ken,

Clueless again.

Here's a temp email for me

munochoc@guerrillamail.org

good for an hour. Once you respond I'll give you my real email so we can figure out this unable to install deal

Anonymous said...

Will it work on FF 2.0, or do I have to bite the bullet and install 3.0?

Anonymous said...

Nice tool - I'd like to keep a personal rating though - some posters with high marks wouldn't make my personal list.

Comrade Terry said...

Great stuff, Ken - thank you! It's like Greasemonkey Killfile on steroids.

I did have to disable Greasemonkey to get CR Companion to function.

NervousRex said...

Hi Ken,

Nemo! Hey, wonderful job on the plugin, it was getting to be impossible to keep up with CR, which is the most happening place in the noosphere.

Best regards,
NR

Anonymous said...

love the addon, now my question. How would I go about changing the sound the Mortgage Pig makes? Running XP with FF 3.03

Thanks again Ken. I don't post much but have learned alot over the time from the regulars, you included

Anonymous said...

Ken,

Thank you for this, I will install it shortly. I missed it's debut due to taking the weekend off from doom and gloom and when I got back, I only read CR's posts and comment threads under 200.

It's great that CR is so widely read, it's awful that so many new readers treat it as just another blog to crap their retarded brains out on.

Anonymous said...

Ken,

I observed this now several times so I thought, I'd report it.

You likely seem to have a character set translation issue with the quote character.

One of my recent posts illustrates it well:

http://www.haloscan.com/comments/calculatedrisk/5998408596902643948/#774482

I just pasted the excerpt from this link (page 7):

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom?tid=true#page7