Elegy For A Chrome Extension

Or, Why Medium Changed Their Front-End

This week I closed down one of my small SaaS businesses. I knew this day would come from the time I started working on the project but decided to continue the project anyway, as a learning exercise, and because initially, I wanted the extension for my own use.

This was the product. You’ll notice that it returns a 404, and that’s because I’ve unpublished it. This is because I received an email from a customer on Wednesday.

Since the product was a Chrome extension that interacted with a major website’s front-end, I knew immediately what had happened. The major website had changed its layout.

No problem, I thought, “let’s take a look at the changes and I’ll roll out an update counteracting them”. Well, it turns out, they’d specifically made changes to block the extension.

While I unpublished the extension this week because of the new front-end, this was one problem of many that came up after launching the extension. This post is about these myriad problems.

From The Beginning

Let’s start from the beginning. What is the extension? You’ve heard the advice to “solve your own problems”. Well, last year I started a newsletter [1] that I was trying to find an audience for. One potential way of getting in front of readers was Medium. In the past, I’d seen growth hacking extensions for managing social media accounts: