I tried your extension but it caused Chrome to get stuck in an infinite redirection loop.
I used the eBook link to amazon.com on this page: http://37signals.com/remote/
Show HN: I built a Chrome extension to donate to charities while on Amazon
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Re: Show HN: I built a Chrome extension to donate to charities while on Amazon
#12This is a great cause. Just one concern: I understand the desire to quantify the difference you're making in the world, but seeing the counter that (currently) says "66 redirects have been made with this extension!" actually influenced me to not install the extension. It seems like the implementation of that could easily leak the list of things I look at on Amazon to you or others, and it shouldn't need to "phone hom…
I completely understand - this was one of our major concerns when we were deciding whether or not we should count redirects. If you look at the function incrementCounter() in the code (https://github.com/Jdhaimson/smilealways/blob/master/chromep...) you can see that all we are doing is pinging the server without passing any information along to increment a counter each time someone is redirected.
That being said, I think I will take it off of the site because it can be scary if you don't look at the code. Thanks for the suggestion!
Re: Show HN: I built a Chrome extension to donate to charities while on Amazon
#13Is it really necessary for this extension to "access your data on all websites" and "access your tabs and browsing activity"? That's asking a lot.
Shouldn't it only need to access amazon.com? E.g. once it detects my browser is on amazon.com, just redirect to smile.amazon.com. What else does it need to do?
Re: Show HN: I built a Chrome extension to donate to charities while on Amazon
#14I tried your extension but it caused Chrome to get stuck in an infinite redirection loop. I used the eBook link to amazon.com on this page: http://37signals.com/remote/
Thanks for letting me know! Was it this link that caused the issue for you? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C0ALZ0W?ie=UTF8&tag=rand...
For some reason, it seems to be working fine for me.
Re: Show HN: I built a Chrome extension to donate to charities while on Amazon
#15Is it really necessary for this extension to "access your data on all websites" and "access your tabs and browsing activity"? That's asking a lot. Shouldn't it only need to access amazon.com? E.g. once it detects my browser is on amazon.com, just redirect to smile.amazon.com. What else does it need to do?
It probably waits until you hit a site it that's in in their store catalog and redirects with the proper CJ/LS/Amazon link. I wrote something similar for Firefox a few years ago.
Re: Show HN: I built a Chrome extension to donate to charities while on Amazon
#16Be VERY careful with this - it may end up hurting the charities you want to help. If Amazon dislikes this they may not be able to do anything to you (or to get you to stop it) but they may be able to shut down charities that are receiving money because of you. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find language in the affiliate agreements that bars this kind of thing and kills accounts of charities that use it.
Re: Show HN: I built a Chrome extension to donate to charities while on Amazon
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't want to discourage you, but socialvest.us and aflattr.com both did redirect via affiliate links and were burned from Amazon.
And it absolutely makes sense. Amazon isn't just giving out free money. Affiliates are meant to drive traffic to the Amazon website. This service doesn't seem to do that.
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Re: Show HN: I built a Chrome extension to donate to charities while on Amazon
#18Is it really necessary for this extension to "access your data on all websites" and "access your tabs and browsing activity"? That's asking a lot. Shouldn't it only need to access amazon.com? E.g. once it detects my browser is on amazon.com, just redirect to smile.amazon.com. What else does it need to do?
Pretty sure chrome requires all extensions to state that. It's not that the application needs to, but in the event that it does, chrome wants a catch-all phrase.
Re: Show HN: I built a Chrome extension to donate to charities while on Amazon
#19How about a browser extension that tries to find local/national alternatives to Amazon while viewing articles on Amazon?
Re: Show HN: I built a Chrome extension to donate to charities while on Amazon
#20Is it really necessary for this extension to "access your data on all websites" and "access your tabs and browsing activity"? That's asking a lot. Shouldn't it only need to access amazon.com? E.g. once it detects my browser is on amazon.com, just redirect to smile.amazon.com. What else does it need to do?
Pretty sure chrome requires all extensions to state that. It's not that the application needs to, but in the event that it does, chrome wants a catch-all phrase.
That's not true. Look at the first example in the docs: http://developer.chrome.com/extensions/permission_warnings.h...