Kudos for "shipping" something. That is the hardest part sometimes. As per your request for feedback (though I wouldn't say I'm smarter than you), some thoughts:
1) The link to your github repo is broken on your blog post.
2) In your manifest.json, you're setting permissions to "tabs", "www.google.com", "http://*/* and "https://*/*. If I'm not mistaken, the urls listed in the permissions field are for urls you'd like your extension to be able to call out to when doing AJAX requests, posts, etc. Enabling your app to make cross-site request to every domain, when you really only need google.com for the calendar, might throw up a red flag to more security-conscious users.
3) You're injecting a blank css document into every url the user visits. I would remove this unless you're planning on adding some styles into the css file.
4) The only other thing I see is more preference: You're doing a lot of work with the browser's dom api to create elements in your content script. Since you're already including jQuery in your extension, it would be trivial to inject the jQuery.js file into the page via your content script and use the power of jQuery to create your dom elements in far less code. Of course, there is nothing wrong with doing it in using raw JavaScript since it's targeted at a single browser and you don't need to worry about being cross browser compatible.
Thanks for posting, I'm always curious to see how other extensions are put together and might take away some ideas on interacting with google services.
1) The link should be fixed now. Thanks for informing me about that. I think I had a return character in it accidentally.
2) Okay, that makes sense. I think you are correct because when the user installs the extension it says something along the lines of needing access to basically any data. Obviously, my extension wouldn't need all that data. That must be the issue then.
3) Ahh, right. I had some stuff in there at one point but then decided to not use it. Must've forgot to delete it.
4) I had thought during the process that there was probably a better way to do it. However, for sake of just getting something out there I've left this code as is. Believe it or not, it was worse at one point. I'll look into other ways of doing it, though.
I've noticed that you didn't put any open-source license with your code, which is understandable since it's your first. :)
So my question (likely to others) is this: when you do that kind of week-end projects, do you put a license with it and if so, which one?
The reason I'm asking is I also put some code on GitHub from little projects, but without any license for now, mostly because I didn't really care either way. But I imagine it'd make sense to know about a few good ones to go with and use that for most cases. (for example, it seems to me that the MIT license has got some popularity over the GPL, but I'm not sure why)
MIT: here's my code, you can do what you want, just don't be a dick.
GPL: here's my code. If you use it to build something on top of, your code must be open source two. And here's a long list of ways of bypassing that that aren't allowed.
I hadn't even thought about that to be honest with you. What's the process for even putting a license on your code? Do you just say so in the README file or something?
I just noticed this on last.fm, you may want to add z-index: 9999; to your "popOver" styles to fix problems where sites give their logos a z-index. Also, I'm missing a close/cancel button. Lastly, adding support for last.fm's format ("Saturday 22 January 2011") would be sweet.
Thanks for the tips. If you look in the README on the code, you'll see that two of those actually fall under stuff I'm currently working on. Also, I'll add that date format shortly.
The indentation is crazy (subjective). Use spaces not tabs, choose 2 or 4 spaces. I prefer two, but don't really care.
there's a lot of repetition:
All of the textboxes could be initialized with a function that took key/value pairs for attributes. They are all set to float right.
don't write stuff like document.getElementById("popOver") over and over, it's ugly. Do it once and assign it to a local variable. This is for style, not efficiency.
I didn't read the getTextSelection() function thoroughly, but in my experience, stuff that looks like that never works quite right. Attacking date inputs is tough, and will probably require a separate, tested library.
"The indentation is crazy (subjective)." - I tend to like to use tabs just because it's easier on the eyes to see how code blocks differentiate and I've grown accustomed to hitting tab rather than space. Perhaps I'll try that out, though.
"there's a lot of repetition" - Right, I did that as kind of the quick and dirty way to get it up. I will most likely end up changing that as per your suggestion. Thanks.
"Attacking date inputs is tough, and will probably require a separate, tested library." - You're right, it's not very fun. Thanks for the suggestion, I think this should work a lot better for me: http://www.datejs.com/
1) The link to your github repo is broken on your blog post.
2) In your manifest.json, you're setting permissions to "tabs", "www.google.com", "http://*/* and "https://*/*. If I'm not mistaken, the urls listed in the permissions field are for urls you'd like your extension to be able to call out to when doing AJAX requests, posts, etc. Enabling your app to make cross-site request to every domain, when you really only need google.com for the calendar, might throw up a red flag to more security-conscious users.
3) You're injecting a blank css document into every url the user visits. I would remove this unless you're planning on adding some styles into the css file.
4) The only other thing I see is more preference: You're doing a lot of work with the browser's dom api to create elements in your content script. Since you're already including jQuery in your extension, it would be trivial to inject the jQuery.js file into the page via your content script and use the power of jQuery to create your dom elements in far less code. Of course, there is nothing wrong with doing it in using raw JavaScript since it's targeted at a single browser and you don't need to worry about being cross browser compatible.
Thanks for posting, I'm always curious to see how other extensions are put together and might take away some ideas on interacting with google services.