YouTube link popups on beta (for the third time! yay!)

I hereby announce that my hand-written script, the YouTube Link Popups, is now on public beta.... and for the third time at that! :P

Now, you should be able to see a popup when you hover your pointer over a link to a YouTube video in the articles. That popup will show, among others, the video's thumbnail as well as a few vital information such as upload date, duration, views and ratings.

Here's a screenshot of the popup in action (the yt link itself is the one underlined):

As a heads-up: I pulled back the beta the last two times because I think the popup is messing up the Visual Editor. That's purely speculation though, as at that time the Visual Editor itself is fairly new, and new stuff are bound to come with problems. Still, if you find that the VE persistently go FUBAR around you from here onwards, and you suspect this script might have anything to do with it, please inform me by posting in this thread. Otherwise, you'll do wise to contact staff directly.

Other than that, if you have suggestions, feedbacks, comments, and problems regarding the popup, feel free to add a reply to this thread.

Have fun! :D

(Edited by Mfaizsyahmi)

Soalric·5/14/2014

Huh, neat!

I'll check it out and see how it is. :)

(Edited by Soalric)

FegeleinParodies·5/14/2014

Nice work. How long did this take you to write the script (including researching relevant APIs, etc)?

(Edited by FegeleinParodies)

Mfaizsyahmi·5/14/2014

It does took a while. With the YouTube API there are the manuals provided by Google, so I can always refer to the document now and then.

Processing the returned data takes a lot longer to figure out. Because the way the response (in XML) are formatted, and the fact that some browsers' javascript engine parses XML differently than others, I have to stick to gecko/Firefox's engine (being the FF master race that I am :P ) when writing the script. The biggest obstacle is parsing the publish date YT gives back (reads something like this: "2013-04-09T17:37:40.000Z") into a human-readable format.

After that there were the testings. I need to figure out how to tell jQuery to correctly position the popup (including not letting it overlap the first-level heading).

And then Darwin and the Visual Editor came out. These introduced new code into the website as a whole. Back then I was unsure if the bugs experienced by some people are a result from the popup itself, the popup's script interfering with the native script, the native script itself, or any combination of the above. That's why I pulled back the open beta twice.

With the new features having its implementation stabilized, I feel that it's the right time to bring back my script. I still don't know if the previous problems by several editors was even partly caused by my script - I have the script running for my personal use for months and nothing severe happened.

There is still problem with the parsing, as I can tell. I opened the wiki on Chrome on a whim and found that Chrome's javascript couldn't parse some of the numbers, thus they appear as "NaN". I could brainstorm into how to fix it, or I could just tell prople to use Firefox instead. :P

(Edited by Mfaizsyahmi)

Mfaizsyahmi·5/14/2014

As a side note, here's a brief chronology of the YT Link Popup script. If any of you here in this wiki had been observant, I've had three versions of this popup thing spanning back for more than a year.

The first version simply inserts a little embedded YT player in the siderail. The Wikia Staff didn't like me messing with the sidebar so they removed that. (I have no idea they put ads there, I've been using ABP the whole time so I couldn't tell. :P")

The second version is simply a reimplementation of the first, except that it has a proper positioning, similar to the current version. This version dates back to April 2013. I didn't realize a year has already passed!

The third and current version was first implemented in Oct '13.

(Edited by Mfaizsyahmi)

FegeleinParodies·5/14/2014

Thanks for the detailed response, interesting. Parsing the returned strings can be a pain, I can agree from my limited experience with some Google APIs (which are thankfully well documented) for when I did Android development. Browser fragmentation doesn't help at all in this case. Still find this interesting though, I'm certainly thinking of giving JS a try beyond the basics I already know in the future.

(Edited by FegeleinParodies)

Mfaizsyahmi·5/17/2014

Help:Templates. Please do not hijack threads with unrelated posts next time.

(Edited by Mfaizsyahmi)

Mfaizsyahmi·6/15/2014

KNOWN BUGS: Numbers are not parsed properly on Chrome-based (webkit) browsers, leading to "null views" and "aN:aN" in the duration. I can't seem to figure out how to squash this bug. Any help would be appreciated.

(Edited by Mfaizsyahmi)

What do you think?