Last year, our friends at TBWA\ asked us to create a Chrome extension for their client Adressändring. Adressändring’s services are normally used to forward mail when moving to a new place, and now they wanted to reach a younger demographic. This Chrome extension forwards a user’s social life by taking over banner space, much like Adblock. Instead of removing the banners, as Adblock does, it swaps them for feeds from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Technically this meant alot of black magic and unconventional methods. Serverside we didn’t want to make lookups in a database, or fetch data from an API, for every banner rendered. If a user enters Aftonbladet.se, we have to render at least 15 content areas from our servers, so these servers need to serve only static content to keep up with even a small load.
We decided to store all data in static json files on the server, serving them via Nginx. When the user installs the extension, we make a request to the server to create a new user (= a new json-file). As a response to the request, the server returns the identifier and stores it in localStorage. Access tokens from the various social media sites are then stored in this file.
When a user browses the web, the extensions makes a timed request to update the users feeds (= json files). This way the user will always get semi fresh social feeds from the server, and can request static files from Nginx. We had to set up both http and https so the security zones wouldn’t get mixed.
Two things we wish we would have had time to do:
– offload all json files to S3.
– instead of having the extension tell the server when to update a users feeds, we first planned on tailing the Nginx access log with a go or python script. Then we would have grep’d the user identifier, and depending on server load the script would decide if a user’s feeds should be updated or not.
The Chrome extension itself may get a separate blog post eventually. This got way too long anyway.
Oh, feel free to try out the extension!