December 2025 Work Log (Patreon)

Hi again! Hope you all had a nice holiday break. Here's everything I worked on during the month of December, exclusively for patrons.

Link Cleaner

You might recall from the previous work log that I added a 'Copy and Close' button to Link Cleaner's bookmarklet mode in November. In December, I received a bug report that it wasn't working in Chrome, which turned out to be the browser window closing before the clipboard copy action was completed.

In modern browsers, Link Cleaner uses the writeText() clipboard API method, which is asynchronous—it doesn't stop the next lines of code from running. The first part of the fix was waiting for the clipboard copy to complete before continuing with the window close code, and the second part was adding an additional 0.5-second delay before closing the window. I'm not sure why Chromium browsers need a little bit of extra time after the clipboard copy is supposed to be finished, but at least now the feature works.

I also started the groundwork for a future 'Link Cleaner Wrapped' feature, which would go live near the end of 2026, in the same style as Spotify Wrapped and all the other similar year-end summaries. It will give you a count of how many links you cleaned throughout the year, organized by each month. This feature only stores a number variable for each month—not the links themselves—and the data is stored in your browser. That means if you use Link Cleaner on four different browsers, you'll get four different year-end summaries. Not as useful, but (hopefully) still kind of fun.

There's no interface that shows this data yet, but you can check it by opening your browser's JavaScript console and running this command:

JSON.parse(localStorage['clean-db'])

When I run it on my main desktop browser, I can see 16 links cleaned for December 2025:

I'll probably add a panel to the settings page that shows this data year-round. Maybe some bar graphs, too? Who doesn't love bar graphs? It's not feature bloat if it's whimsical.

Wikipedia Search

It has now been over three years since the last update to Wikipedia Search, my browser extension for searching Wikipedia that dates back to 2014. It's feature-complete and still mostly working, so I haven't really needed to touch it. Still, it could use some code cleanup and interface updates, so I'm now working on Wikipedia Search v12.

The main (visible) changes so far are full-size welcome and settings pages, matching my other extensions like Peek and Share to Mastodon. I might merge those into a single page, depending on how many settings will be in the final update.

I have also removed the theme setting, which previously allowed you to change the frontend used for search results between desktop Wikipedia, mobile Wikipedia, and Wikiwand. The mobile option no longer works (Wikipedia redirects you to the desktop site), and I'm not sure anyone cares about Wikiwand at this point. I tried replacing it with a setting for switching between all of Wikipedia's currently-supported skins, but the URL parameters only work when you navigate directly to an article page, not the search redirect that the extension uses.

Under the hood, I'm rewriting much of the extension's code with better documentation and fewer nested callbacks. I have already reworked most of the code for picking and refreshing the language list, since it was a mess and was holding some improvements I want to try implementing. That was a problem for future me, and now I am future me.

I'll work on more code cleanup, then investigate some possible new settings and other new features. I might also finally publish it on Firefox and the Microsoft Edge add-ons store, but I'm not totally sure yet.