Skip to main content

PixieBrix: An Introduction 🧚🏾‍♀️🧱

 

 PixieBrix is basically a bit of software where you can essentially make the web usable for your specific use cases. For example, if you want to snag the name, title, and contact info on someone's LinkedIn profile and export it to a private document, you can "install" a button to press on each fitting page to click and add info.

Of course, the button isn't installed on LinkedIn proper. It's a bit like something I believe was called Whiteboard; You  could put in any url and see what people had drawn on the page, but it only appeared locally.

The big caveat so far is that it's Chrome only for the extension. 

ComputerWorld has a great guide about it that you can find here; I had heard about it from a live webinar about the program - I was curious to see what we would be using, and lo and behold.

You do need to use the Dev Tools; If you aren't familiar with it, it's a built-in function of most browsers that let you see how the webpage is operating in real time if there are active elements, check the network and performance, an entire slew of cool things.

The templates gallery is where we'll start; After you open PixieBrix in the Dev Tools menu (Don't worry, they hold your hand and get you there), there's a large visible button.

I chose to start with the Snippet Manager:



You can read the instructions here, I'm focusing on how PixieBrix works with the Dev Tools. The actual templates aren't loaded into the Dev Tools; There are external links to take you to the actual setup that open in a side panel. It's a lot of branching out of tabs that might get a little confusing.

And that it sort of did; When you connect to your Google Drive for this particular instance, a second box beneath says 'Google Sheet', as if you could select an already pre-existing one. Nothing would load, but we don't let that stop me, so I just continue to activate it and it works allegedly, giving the impression of having created a new sheet, but checking my Google Sheets setup, nothing new is created.

Luckily, redoing the steps is easy, and listing all the Sheets I have available - including the copy of the template they told me to make before activating the manager template - appear to be selected.

And now when I click the button on the nav bar, this pops up on the side;


And I can easily click one of the snippets, it copies to the clipboard, and I can and copy and paste it somewhere; Here's how PixieBrix works after you've set up a template.



That is extremely helpful! Imagine all the quick replies and answers you can automate in emails if you use Chrome as your daily browser. I only wonder how formatting would work, adding line breaks and links as you have to insert each snippet into it's own row in Google Sheets.

You could automate your response to every job outreach and just click and send (After addressing them by name, of course). 

Is this the tool people online in the business sphere use to say 'align', 'connect', 'next steps', and other buzzwords at lightning speed?

I'd love to see if PixieBrix can:

  • Create a module where I highlight and copy a phrase; The context menu that pops up on a right click would have an option to automatically save it into a Google Doc of my choosing.

Most of PixieBrix seems to work with Sheets, so not quite, but still cool.

When it comes to making custom modules, then the Dev Tools really come into play. Everything after this has been written after the live demo.

  • There is also an Edge version in the works. I really wish there was a FireFox version in the works too, but baby steps.

 Since I couldn't immediately paste to a Google Doc, I wanted to see if I could at least Translate with the context menu from English to Chinese but the input wasn't inputting. I could highlight the word and the context menu would pop up with Translate, but it wouldn't translate. The debugger that PixieBrix works with had an output, but it wasn't showing anything.

Much like Retool last year, the highlighted text would have to be put into a field (Kind of like assigning something to a variable in Python), in this case it was @output.translatedText (Thank you to Britt Joiner at PixieBritt's Slack for the help!).

And now I can work on my Chinese while reading things in Chrome (rarely). Fun fact, the day this was published, I had to use Chrome for some UX testing. So at least now I can translate from English to Chinese!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting IoT Devices to a Registration Server (Packet Tracer, Cisco)

In Packet Tracer, a demo software made by Cisco Systems. It certainly has changed a lot since 2016. It's almost an Olympic feat to even get started with it now, but it does look snazzy. This is for the new CCNA, that integrates, among other things, IoT and Automation, which I've worked on here before. Instructions here . I don't know if this is an aspect of "Let's make sure people are paying attention and not simply following blindly", or an oversight - The instructions indicate a Meraki Server, when a regular one is the working option here. I have to enable the IoT service on this server. Also, we assign the server an IPv4 address from a DHCP pool instead of giving it a static one. For something that handles our IoT business, perhaps that's safer; Getting a new IPv4 address every week or so is a minimal step against an intruder, but it is a step. There are no devices associated with this new server; In an earlier lab (not shown), I attached them to 'H
Post a Comment
Read more

Securing Terraform and You Part 1 -- rego, Tfsec, and Terrascan

9/20: The open source version of Terraform is now  OpenTofu     Sometimes, I write articles even when things don't work. It's about showing a learning process.  Using IaC means consistency, and one thing you don't want to do is have 5 open S3 buckets on AWS that anyone on the internet can reach.  That's where tools such as Terrascan and Tfsec come in, where we can make our own policies and rules to be checked against our code before we init.  As this was contract work, I can't show you the exact code used, but I can tell you that this blog post by Cesar Rodriguez of Cloud Security Musings was quite helpful, as well as this one by Chris Ayers . The issue is using Rego; I found a cool VS Code Extension; Terrascan Rego Editor , as well as several courses on Styra Academy; Policy Authoring and Policy Essentials . The big issue was figuring out how to tell Terrascan to follow a certain policy; I made it, put it in a directory, and ran the program while in that directory
Post a Comment
Read more

Create a Simple Network (Packet Tracer) + A Walkthrough

Again; I've done this, but now there's so many new things, I'm doing it again. The truly new portions were...everything on the right side of this diagram; The cloud needed a coax connector and a copper Ethernet connector. It's all easy to install, turn off the cloud (Weird), install the modules. Getting the Cable section of Connections was an unusual struggle - The other drop down menu had nothing within. It required going into the Ethernet options and setting the Provider Network to 'cable', which is the next step AFTER the drop-downs. The rest was typical DHCP and DNS setups, mainly on the Cisco server down there. The post is rather short - How about adding a video to it? Find out what A Record means - This site says 'Maps a name to an IP address', which is DNS. So it's another name for DNS? You can change them (presumably in a local context) to associate an IP address to another name.
Post a Comment
Read more