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Post Editor for Google+ – a Chrome Extension for formatting Google+ posts

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Post Editor for Google+ – a Chrome Extension for formatting Google+ posts
Google+ doesn’t offer a ton of formatting options for your posts and the ones it does have you have to remember the markup to use. This isn’t so big a deal for those of us who use it regularly or have been around since the beginning. However, it comes up often when I talk with new or infrequent users. So I created a Google Chrome extension called ‘Post Editor for Google+‘ to help!

Post Editor for Google+ adds formatting buttons to the bottom of the post box so you can easily style your posts. It also includes a variety of symbols that you can automatically inject into your post.

You can grab the extension from the Chrome Web Store: http://goo.gl/ywkWj3

Right now it works with the main post box. If enough people find it useful I can extend it to work with the comment fields as well.

View this post on Google+

or inline here (comments for this site and Google+ are listed below!)

Comments

  14. For now it's a handful of things like a heart, smile, frown, skull and crossbones, Yin Yang, etc. There are plenty more that could be added. My first beta had so many I had to scroll down the page to see them all so I paired it back for the v1 release.

  18. You will need Google Chrome to install most apps, extensions and themes.
    Download Google Chrome
    用不了，差评（╯－＿－）╯╧╧

  21. Thanks!
    Yes… please add comment support along with a signature or even multiple sig saving with a default that can be changed per post… ie: use sig by default? Yes. Which sig? Sig3

  24. what +Leo Allen was asking is that everyone can see the symbols…  at least that's what it sounded like to me.. 

    please extend this to the comments..  comments is where i would use this the most. 

    thanks for sharing. 

  25. Some of us would like to share a consistent message for x amount of time… ie: back in the sopa days "ps… #StopSOPA !!!".
    And actually for the same reasons you made this awesome extention to begin with… to alleviate the pains of repetitive typing.
    Aloha!

  44. Never mind my question +Paul Spoerry. Once I installed and see his it works, I understand n now!
    When I went to install the extension, there were 2 people who had rated it. The second person asked if the formatted text and such can seen by all users, not just uaera of the extension. I believe this type of question is born out of experience with apps and extensions that allow you to modify Facebook layout and text. But those types of things are only visable to the users themselves, or others with the same app/extension.

  46. Thanks for doing this.  Man I've wanted something like this for the longest time.  Not that inserting code into my posts is inconvenient, but this is just so much easier.  Thanks!

  49. This is very exciting, but I'm having trouble with it.  I am experiencing a redirect loop immediately upon applying any of the available styling options.  +Paul Spoerry, have you received any other feedback of this sort?  Note I do have multiple G+ accounts attached to my profile.  Not sure if that makes a difference in this case.  

  63. Please make it possible for the comments box. It's pretty useless for the "main" one, since many of us come here to actually use the social network not to post every 5 minutes!

    Great addon. GG.

  64. +Daniel Fitzgerald I use Chrome and have no experience with making FireFox extensions so it's not likely that I would make one for FireFox. However, the code is on GitHub is someone would like to fork it for that reason. 

    +Filip H.F. Slagter I think I know exatly why it won't work for the /u/o scenario. The extension is defined to ONLY work when it matches a particular URL structure. But I can probably fix that pretty easily. Can you send me an example URL of someone with multiple signins? 

    +Alexander Terry You can do what +Kamal Tailor does by surrounding your post title with *'s. Or… make your title and then highlight it and hit the [B] button in the extension and it'll put them around it for you! 

    +Christopher Foley The first button (the one that says "Post Editor" has a broken URL which I will fix ASAP. I think I wanted the URL for the extension in there, but needed it published before I had the URL.. chicken and egg scenario. If you're somehow hitting that button you might have that issue. Now… why that button would be activating when you're hitting the [B] button I'm not sure… but I will certainly look into it. Also… yeah Google does some weird thing around the spacing of elements and the markup. I'm sure people will run into scenario's I didn't think of (there is some code in there that handles spacing issues with the selection, etc). Feel  free to send me any specifics you run into. 

    +Luc Suy Thanks for pointing that out. The page not found on the post editor button is on my ToDo!

    +ALL Comments seem to be of big interest. I'll add that to my todo list and work on it as time becomes available. Thanks for the feedback!

  66. The toolbar isn't really necessary. They simply need to have grey fade-out font that says " – for strike through, _ for italic, * for bold "

  67. +Paul Spoerry as I browse G+, my URLs automatically get changed to start with https://plus.google.com/u/0/

    When I got to my profile via G+, I often get https://plus.google.com/u/0/112064652966583500522/posts

    I could help writing a regex to match only certain pages, but why not match everything on the plus.google.com domain?
    Imho this helper should appear on every text box.

    Most of the pages on G+ allow for resharing a post, which means that a 'post new message' box would pop up where the formatting tools would come in handy.

    Personally I would probably auto-append the formatting tools to any textarea that becomes active/focused, and only have 'plus.google.com'-domain as URL restriction.

  69. Nice tool for n00bs and every-once-in-a-while-GPlussers, as intended in the description.
    Like +Rivison Delmondes mentioned above, there's a small link lapse in the extension itself: If one clicks on the link provided in Chrome's hamburger  menu > Tools > Extensions > Post Editor… the link there ("Visit website")  does not point to post-editor-for-google-plus but to google-plus-editor-formatting so all you get is a 404 error page.

  73. +Filip H.F. Slagter you're absolutely right. Using Google's formatting well-we-offer-sth-but-did-not-think-it-thru can be a pain, if you try to implement it "on the fly" i.e. whilst typing. How many times did I have to overhaul posts/comments bc formatting just didn't work.

    On the other hand: I really like Google+ for its simplicity. Tools like this editor could will probably result in "voluptuously over-formatted" posts and comments, so all I can say is "please handle with care!" 🙂

  75. doesn't work the new style link sharing that G+ has just rolled out.
    Also doesn't work if I go back to edit a post.
    But it's much better when writing the initial post. The formatting toolbar is one of the reasons I use DoShare.

  81. +The Huffington Post Nope… doesn't slow down G+ or Chrome. This is the first release so things may need to be tweaked but for the main page's post box it should work well.

    There have been many requests for comments. That might be in the near future. I also haven't tested it in communities (anybody else tried that yet?). 

    broken links I just pushed out the fix for the broken links (v1.0.2). According to Google it may take up to 60 minutes for it to show up in the Chrome Store. I had changed the post title last minute so that I could conform to Google's requests for how you refer to a Google property/application. 

    +Filip H.F. Slagter … the extension is setup to work with the entire plus.google.com domain. EX:
    "content_scripts": [
        {
          "matches": [ "https://plus.google.com/*" ],……

    Best guess is that the elements have a different name (G+ has some insane/dense formatting) in different sections. I'll put checking into that on my ToDo list and if it's a simple fix push that out as quick as I can. 

    And you're right… addressing some of the weirder work arounds could certainly be added.

  90. +Marie-Florence Chabbal Ton I've heard it does not work on business pages (I don't have one so I haven't been able to test). 

    Something for both you and +Filip H.F. Slagter to try (him via his profile page). Hit the F5 key and refresh the page… see if the editor buttons come up. I haven't tracked down why just yet but when I go to my profile and then refresh once I'm there, the post editor displays. Its on my list to look into why that is…

  96. +Paul Spoerry I've been doing some console logging, and there are times where:
      console.log($('div[guidedhelpid="sharebox_editor"]'));
    will return:
      [prevObject: o.fn.init[1], context: document, selector: "div[guidedhelpid="sharebox_editor"]", jquery: "2.1.0", constructor: function…]
    instead of an actual DOM object. As a result, the .after() call that will insert the actual gpebuttons fails.
    Not sure yet what the reason is, but I'll see if I can dig some deeper. 

    Maybe you can add Issues on your github project, and open an issue for this bug, so we can more easily discuss our findings? Just tag me with @FiXato in the issue. 🙂

  98. First of all, thanks for this extension, it’s amazing!

    As I’m primary using Firefox I wanted to port it as an userscript. Here it is on pastebin:

    http://pastebin.com/WCXMuAaT

    I’m not sure how you trigger the event, or does webkit works differently, but in Firefox the only place the editor is appended is under “share” button in the upper right corner. I was trying all sorts of events to trigger it on main sharebox, but failed. If you could look into it, it would be great. If not, no hard feelings 🙂

    Again, thanks for this 🙂

  99. eboye I’m very sorry but I’ve never coded userscripts in FireFox so I’m not really sure how to point you in the right direction. We have some discussion going on GitHub over why it won’t trigger on profile/business pages that might help point you in the right direction though.

  100. eboye… Look for this to see how it attaches to the share box.

    $(‘div[guidedhelpid=”sharebox_editor”]’).after(‘\…..

    You might want to do another pull on GitHub as well as there have been a few updates.

  101. Thanks Paul,

    I was trying with $(‘div[guidedhelpid=”sharebox_editor”]‘).after(‘\….. but for some reason that selector is only fetching one div as the div for input (the main one) is populated after click and I cannot intercept it.

    Thanks for help, I’ll try to find a solution somehow.

    And userscript is basically adding the javascript to the document upon page loading. Chrome addons are very similiar with this approach. One thing extensions have that userscripts don’t is Chrome APIs which I think this extension is not using 🙂

    Cheers

  102. Hey +Paul Spoerry, really great to see this! Two weeks ago I released The Plus Editor (http://goo.gl/y5Fhao), which basically does the same thing as your Post Editor, but it's web based rather than being an extension.

    I have no idea if your extension has anything to do with +The Plus Editor, but whether it does or doesn't, I'm extremely glad you've created this helpful tool for the community. Thank you!

  104. +Paul Spoerry Awesome article!! Thanks for sharing! I guess our minds think alike 😉

    btw.. Sent you a PM… I'm sure you're extremely busy now so no rush, but I'd love to hear back from you when you get a chance 🙂

  105. v.1.0.6 has been pushed up and should resolve the issues of it not displaying for some people. Please note that in order for the extension to inject the Post Editor certain elements have to be present on the G+ page. The page may begin to display (allowing you to click to share something) before those elements exist. The plugin will now poll for that element and inject the Post Editor once the elements appear. 

    +Daniel Futerman Got your PM… reply is on my ToDo list!  :O)

  112. +Paul Spoerry, I want to first tell you what a delight it was to read your bio in here. You sound like a better-than-rounded person and kudos for your non-profit work! I’m looking forward to learning more about The Little Big Fund. I added the extension, however I have yet to see it appear. I will send you my URL because it is an example of a multiple-user address. Hope it helps both of us because I want in on all the fun you’re all having. =D https://plus.google.com/u/0/me?tab=mX
    P.S. Isn’t +Daniel Futerman awesome! …no competition- just Google Plus love. You both are great examples of people helping people. I hope to pay it forward someday.

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