A Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox extension for switching between user accounts on LiveJournal-based websites.
http://rushin-doll.net/lj-juggler/
As always, feel free to send questions, concerns, comments, or suggestions via email to rushin.doll@gmail.com.
Behind-the-scenes
- Reduced the scope of browser permissions the extension requires because some things that were experimental way back when it first launched are now standard and don't require special permission to use. Should have zero impact on user experience, but will keep Chrome happy.
- Removed references to non-https (old http) data transmission. Back in the day it wasn't that uncommon to send data over unencrypted connections (and a number of systems to keep your data safe were used), but now we can just rely on secure connections, so we will.
Behind-the-scenes (MAJOR CHANGES)
- Updated to work with some security enhancements instituted by InsaneJournal
Behind-the-scenes (MAJOR CHANGES)
- Fixed a regression introduced in 5.0.0 that broke creating new accounts for InsaneJournal
User-facing
- Some minor visual tweaks to make life easier on mobile devices, especially in cases with larger text sizes
Behind-the-scenes (MAJOR CHANGES)
- Huge thanks to momijizukamori for surfacing this issue and helping find a work-around so quickly.
- Dreamwidth just deployed a significant set of upgrades to the way that they handle user passwords, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, it has broken the way that LJ Juggler logs users in. Doubly unfortunately, all fixes that we can think of involve re-entering all of your accounts. Basically, LJ Juggler has not stored your passwords in plain text (which is a bit more secure) so we can't log you in automatically under the new system. We know this is going to be hugely inconvenient, for which we're sorry, but there's nothing we can do about it, and the changes that Dreamwidth has made to security are a big step up for them.
- This version 5.0.0 represents a temporary work-around for the problems that the new system has introduced to the way we log users in. Ultimately, we want to start using Dreamwidth's much more secure API key system that would mean we wouldn't have to store your passwords at all. However, that would take longer, and we want to get this version out the door for those who need access to the working extension ASAP.
- WARNING! LJ Juggler stores its data in a manner that is accessible to people who have physical access to your computer (assuming they know what to look for). Historically, we've stored your passwords as "cryptographic hashes" (using the MD5 algorithm) which means that people can't just see what your password is even if they have your computer and go looking for it. This new approach will store your password in plain text. So if someone gets your computer, and knows what to look for, they can see all of your LJ Juggler account passwords.
- We're hoping to introduce a much more secure option in the future, one that uses API keys in a way that means we don't have to store your password on the local computer at all, but that's not ready yet. In the meantime, you can use this version, but be aware that you're taking on some risk in case someone gets physical access to your computer.
User-facing
- Added a dark theme to save everyone's eyes.
- Implemented the option to import/export your account lists. This feature works across both browsers, so a list exported from Firefox will work in Chrome and vice versa.
Behind-the-scenes
- As of this release, thanks to some chanages to the manifest--you must now have Firefox 57 or newer (if you don't you really need to update...) to use our extension--and some modfications to the popup and options pages, LJ Juggler now works in Firefox for Android! There is still some work to be done (selecting a new account works but the popup page does not automatically close), but feel free to try it out!
User-facing
Behind-the-scenes
- Updated the way that the extension retrieves connection information. Previously, it was based on what the config said when the specific account was created, not what the config currently is set up for. This meant that if an account was set up before a config change went through (see 4.0.3), the extension would continue to use the old config. A recent (good) change to DreamWidth's security policies surfaced the issue, and the new approach should resolve it. This seems to have also fixed a related issue that was preventing Firefox from logging into Dreamwidth accounts at all. Not sure why exactly that was happening, but it it's been resolved.
User-facing
Behind-the-scenes
- Updated connection targets for Dreamwidth and LiveJournal to use HTTPS by default. This should hopefully alleviate issues that users have had when using certain common extensions such as HTTPS Everywhere which have historically caused errors with LJ Juggler's login code.
User-facing
Behind-the-scenes
- Fixed an odd packaging error in the Chrome web store so the extension should be installable again for Chrome.
User-facing
- Removed GreatestJournal, Deadjournal, Scribbld.us, Inksome, and JournalFen.net from the extension since they don't really exist anymore.
- Hard-coded the height of the journal selection pop-up for Firefox. Due to this Firefox bug the popup does not resize to fit your account list, so a static popup height has been added as a workaround until the bug is fixed. This should not affect Chrome users.
- When LJ Juggler updates to a new version, instead of having an alert pop-up, a new tab will now be opened to this change-log page.
Behind-the-scenes
- First release of Mozilla Firefox port, compatible with version 46.0 and above! Thanks to the huge effort put in by Holly (http://frau_kali.dreamwidth.org) to make this happen.
- As Mozilla moves to adopt the Chrome method for building extensions, we've been able to make updates to the extension code to make it work on both platforms, so we've refactored a ton of API calls from deprecated ones to the new forms that are supported in both Chrome and Firefox.
- Refactored all of our AJAX calls to use asynchronous callback patterns instead of the old synchronous calls we had in place.
User-facing
Behind-the-scenes
- Add support for managing accounts on the Scribbld.us domain.
User-facing
- New entry in the options menu to allow you to specify that you want to reload tabs when you change accounts. Options are to not reload tabs, to only reload the current tab, or to reload all tabs. Note that tabs will only be reload if they are on the site for the account you swapped.
Behind-the-scenes
- The plumbing to support reloading, and to make sure we only reload the correct tabs.
- Moving around a number of pieces of code to bring the codebase more in line with Chrome's new security guidelines for extensions.
User-facing
Behind-the-scenes
- Updated the manifest.json file to re-enable searchability within the Google Chrome Store now that extensions can only be installed from there.
User-facing
-
Major visual overhaul. Most of the work was done by TK (http://teek.ca/). This redesign focuses on readability/usability in a number of areas.
- Size font in em units and remove full-width background images so that users can scale up the font in the browser settings for readability without the links becoming unreadable.
- Make clickable objects navigable with a keyboard. I think this will make it possible to use Juggler with a screen-reader.
- Organize the Account Management page to look more like the Account Selection page so that it's easier to delete the accounts you want to delete.
- Change default font to sans-serif for better spacing and readability.
- De-clutter the interface to allow more accounts to be listed in the same amount of space.
- Feedback on these changes is certainly welcome. This is doubly-true if you feel like they're really awful, or if you couldn't use it before and can now.
Behind-the-scenes
- Move CSS and JS code into external files for cleaner compartmentalization.
- Re-structure options.html to re-use the same structure as popup.html for listing accounts.
- Use CSS :hover attributes for controlling hover visuals rather than the stupid, hacky JS that was in place.
- Clean up some of the JS code to make it more readable.
- Eliminate redundant CSS shared between options.html and popup.html to further unify their visual styles.
User-facing
Behind-the-scenes
- Apparently I was a bit overzealous and that didn't actually fix the issue. Ugh. So reverting the revert. Back to the hackery!
- On the possibly bright side, I took this opportunity to implement what I think is a fix to the not-keeping-you-logged-in-between-browser-sessions bug. So yay?
User-facing
Behind-the-scenes
- Revert the hackery from version 3.1.0 since LJ reverted their login process changes. Apparently they did this back in OCtober, but I totally missed it. Anyway, hopefully this will clean up a few bugs people are having, and just generally be better than that earlier terribleness.
User-facing
Behind-the-scenes
- A great amount of hackery in order to allow logging in with LJ's new cookie system. The levels of hackery are ridiculous, but hopefully they work and will end up being invisible to users. A million, million thanks to Andrea Nall for not only telling me what LJ had done to break things, but also providing a great suggestion for how to fix things. That help is the reason this got patched so soon as I was really not looking forward to diving into LJ's code to figure out what they did. So thanks again!
User-facing
- Quick and dirty system to sort accounts by site they are attached to so. Primarily intended to solve usability issues for users who have the same account name on multiple services, but hopefully useful in general. Users who only have accounts on one site shouldn't see any differences.
Behind-the-scenes
- Modified the algorithm that sorts accounts so that it'll sort them properly for the new grouping-by-sites sorting bit.
User-facing
Behind-the-scenes
- That "hopefully" in the last update? Yeah, not so much. Forgot to update manifest.json to clear cross-site access to the new Scribbld.com top-level domain.
User-facing
Behind-the-scenes
- Updated the back-end code to (hopefully) properly point to Scribbld now that they've taken up a .com rather than .net domain.
User-facing
Behind-the-scenes
- Fixed some really face-palmingly stupid bugs from 3.0.3. Wow, that's embarrassing.
User-facing
Behind-the-scenes
- Cleaned up the code's file organization.
- Built a git branch for google's official extension repository so that it's easier to keep users who download from there up-to-date.
User-facing
- Fixed a minor bug in which the Options page would duplicate all the sites in the site-selection drop-down box each time you added an account.
- Tweaked the layout of the drop-down slightly in order to suppress the horizontal scroll-bar in situations where you have enough accounts in the list to generate a vertical-scroll-bar.
Behind-the-scenes
User-facing
Behind-the-scenes
- Modified a utility function in background.html to solve an issue where having the same username on multiple services caused data corruption and led to an error.
User-facing
- When adding a new account on the options page, users now select which of the supported sites the account is for. (If you know of other sites you'd like to see supported, let us know. They're pretty easy to add.)
- Modified the highlighting behavior of the UI to show all accounts you are logged into across all services. This can result in multiple accounts listed as "logged in".
- This is less a change than a not-change, but it's worth mentioning. The login interface does not differentiate between services. All accounts are listed alphabetically. This means that if you use multiple services your accounts will be all mixed together. We're pondering a UI fix on this one, so again if you have suggestions, let us know.
Behind-the-scenes
- Early-stage LJ clone support. The system now allows users to register accounts for LJ clone sites, not just LiveJournal.com.
- Complete overhaul of the behind-the-scenes account highlighting logic. It's significantly more efficient, and more accurate now. It also handles highlighting for multiple accounts now.
User-facing
- When removing an account on the options page, LJ Juggler now asks you to click a confirmation button before deleting it, just in case you accidentally hit the X.
- When adding a new account on the options page, LJ Juggler confirms that the username and password you provide can actually be used to log in. This helps save you from typos and solves error-checking problems later on.
- When you add a new account on the options page, LJ Juggler automatically logs you into that account. We're not sure this is a feature, it might well be a bug (let us know!), but it was the easiest way to handle the validation of accounts.
Behind-the-scenes
- Added a response-code parsing function for login attempts. LJ Juggler can now do more than just fail to log in if something goes wrong, it can try to tell developers why (in the console).
- Moved version check and update code into background.html. This actually saves a LOT of CPU cycles since previously there was a fairly involved asynchronous version check every time you opened the Juggler window.
- Some general code clean up that hopefully paves the way for adding support for LJ clone sites.
User-facing
- Minor UI tweak: modified highlight behavior so that it is slightly more consistent and has slightly higher visibility.
- Added a feature to make site-scheme selection permanent. In previous versions it was a session-length cookie and would expire (and need to be reset) when your browser closed. Now if you set one, it'll stick around for a year. Currently the system will use the same sitescheme for ALL accounts. If different schemes for different accounts is really important to you, let me know and I'll see what I can do!
- Fixed a bug in the cookie expiration calculator so now all cookies set last one year instead of until February of 40572 or some other insane date.
User-facing
- Tweaked CSS so that the mouse pointer stays as a pointer object rather than converting to a cursor when hovering over the user-option that you are currently logged in as.
User-facing
- Minor tweak to differentiate between a selected account that is currently highlighted because the user is hovering the mouse over it, and one that is not highlighted but still selected.
Behind-the-scenes
- Generated a localStorage passing handler so that background.html can handle all localStorage requests from any page in the extension.
- Used an update check to move all the localStorage data to background.html's store so that it's in one place.
- Tweaked popup.html and options.html so that they use the localStorage set up in background.html.
User-facing
- Numerous tweaks to clean up visual elements.
- Modified highlighting behavior per user-feedback.
- Added a link to access account management/options page directly from the extension.
- Added links to the web presence for the extension.
Behind-the-scenes:
- Cleaned up the user-option generating code to be cleaner and slightly more efficient.
- Extensive changes to the highlight logic code to make it more flexible and standardized.
- Shifted the logout (and other option DIVs) from dynamic generation to static generation for easier non-coder modification/duplication.
User-facing:
- Minor tweaks for text visibility on non-Mac systems.
User-facing:
- User interface significantly prettified thanks to Metanomaly.
User-facing:
- A pop-up alert to appear whenever the extension updates to a new version.
- Changed logout procedures so that only the current session is ended. This fixes the long-standing problem that would cause LJ Juggler to interfere with other instances of itself on other machines or with instances of ljlogin on Firefox, or with just about any other login system. They should all play nice now.
Behind-the-scenes:
- Instituted a background page and moved most of the code to it for efficiency and to allow users to do other things while logins change.
- Changed password storage to store hashes rather than plaintext for slightly better local security.
- Shifted to cookie-based login and authentication (the same model used by ljlogin for Firefox). Security bump, much more accurate at recognizing which account is logged in, and noticeable speed increase.