News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Chrome Extension that adds anonymous live chat to every site you're browsing..

Re:Chrome Extension that adds anonymous live chat to every s... by pygy_ on Monday August 22, 2011 @03:57PM (#2913864)
_why was one of the first to implement this, in 2005. It wasn't a chat, but a comment system for hackers.

The installation instructions were intentionaly elusive:

http://web.archive.org/web/20051125122020/http://hoodwinkd.h...

The IP adresses point to DNS servers that serve two custom domains: hoodwink.d and ___._ (or you could add them to your host file? not sure...).

From there you could browse those sites that had further info, and enjoined you to install a greasemonkey script that injected the comment div in the target pages.

To add hoodwink'd comments to a site, you had to register it at hoodwink.d, with an URL regexp to recognize the site, and an xpath query to locate the point where the comment thread would be inserted.

There were also RSS feeds, that allowed to follow a commenter, or get all the updates of a given site.

Cool stuff. .

Here is some more info

A longer description: http://ecmanaut.blogspot.com/2006/01/hoodwinkd.html

Magnus Holm, debugging the system: http://oldblog.judofyr.net/posts/who-broke-hoodwinkd.html

A few screenshots: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robbyrussell/3838274563/in/phot...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Chrome Extension that adds anonymous live chat to every s... by mibbit on Monday August 22, 2011 @04:48PM (#2914051)
> _why was one of the first to implement this, in 2005.

FWIW, I remember quite a few startups doing this around 1999. It's a very old idea.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Chrome Extension that adds anonymous live chat to every s... by judofyr on Monday August 22, 2011 @05:25PM (#2914194)
Hoodwink'd was a fun project. You really felt like you were sneaking around the interwebs, leaving comments and sharing links to a tiny community.

I also have a theory that many of _why's (earliest) most known projects were created because of Hoodwink'd. He needed a web framework, so he wrote Camping. He wanted to write the HTML in Ruby, so he wrote Markaby. In order to inject the hoodwinks into the web page you need a proxy, so he wrote mouseHole. And he wanted a simple way to search and replace HTML in the proxy, so he wrote Hpricot. It's all one big family…

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Chrome Extension that adds anonymous live chat to every s... by pygy_ on Monday August 22, 2011 @06:27PM (#2914408)
This reminds me of the first camping announcement.

He spent perhaps half an hour, probably more, frantically adding surrealist images to the post. I imagined him excited as a kid, stuck in a creativity rut. Good memories.

Do you know how long it took him to write Camping?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Chrome Extension that adds anonymous live chat to every s... by abecedarius on Monday August 22, 2011 @07:28PM (#2914616)
I think http://zesty.ca/crit/ was the first (1997, also comments instead of chat). It took a less playful approach.
[ Parent | on HN ]