Page Keeper — Daniel

This is a simple add-on that I banged together because I wanted to lurk custom sets of subreddits and go fishing for new subreddits. And I'm trying to log into as few websites as possible. And I wanted to do something other than procrastinate on reddit.

You can create, remove, rename and duplicate front pages at any time. To visit the front page, click “front page”. To add a subreddit by name, enter it into the textbox and press enter or click the “add” button to add it to the currently selected front page.

There are certain things with this web extension you can only do whilst on reddit. For example, if you find yourself on a subreddit you like, you can click the “+” button in the top left corner of the extension to add that subreddit (also works on multis). Similarly, the button will be labelled “-“ if that subreddit is already in the selected front page, and clicking it will remove the subreddit. The other thing you can only do while on a reddit page is create a random front page. Do so by pressing “?” and note that if you exit the extension menu, the front page will not save- so you have to wait a bit. You can set some settings that become visible by clicking on the “generator settings” button.

The generator provides two methods of subreddit collection. One method is random- similar to repeatedly pressing the “serendipity” button on reddit itself. The other is a guided search using a key word. Both methods are used together when generating a front page, with the total number of subreddits gathered split between the two methods according to their weights (given as two settings). The weights are relative, and can be 0 (although if both are 0 you won’t get any subreddits). So, for example, if the weight for seeded search is 2 and the weight for guided search is 1, you will get 2 seeded-search subreddits for every random one. You can also exclude subreddits and check/uncheck the “allow nsfw” checkbox.

The cool thing is you can limit your subreddits to a given subscriber or active user limit, essentially restricting your search to smaller/unknown subreddits. This affects both random and guided searches, but keep in mind that setting this smaller means longer search time (reddit’s api doesn’t seem to support this kind of search directly, so it really is just sifting through them until it gets the desired amount of subreddits).