RoyalRefresh

A web extension for royalroad.com.
For people who juggle multiple stories.

Install

Why?

I've been an avid reader on royalroad.com for over 4 years and like many others, I juggle multiple stories at the same time. At some point this got somewhat unmanagable and often I drew a blank when thinking about what happened in the last chapter of the story I just opened. More and more I found myself having to go back one chapter and scroll all the way down just to re-read the last few paragraphs as a refresher. This is especially annoying while on mobile, where I often read while on the train.

That's when decided on trying to implement this little idea implementing a refresh of what happened in the last chapter.

What is it?

RoyalRefresh is a browser extension for royalroad.com that inserts a button next to RoyalRoad's "Reader Preferences" button on chapter URLs. When clicked, the last few paragraphs of the previous chapter get fetched and displayed at the top of the chapter, which you can toggle on and off using the button. The extension defaults to showing you the last 250 words of the previous chapter (adjustable in extension settings, see Settings).

Here's an example of what it looks like:

Settings

The extension comes with a settings page where you can adjust the refresh length and other settings. There are a few ways to access the settings page:

1. Click the extension icon in the browser toolbar to open the popup (Recommended)
2. Open RoyalRoad's "Reader Preferences" menu and click "Open RoyalRefresh settings"
3. Depending on your browser, there may be alternative methods to access the extension settings, (such as using about:addons in Firefox)

Settings page

Advanced users can take advanced of the "Advanced options" toggle to reveal more settings. In case the website gets an update, the user can adjust the CSS selectors to make the extension work again, until a new update of RoyalRefresh is released with the adjusted defaults:

Advanced settings

Bug reports & Ideas

Check out everything I'm tracking in this project's issues.

This is my first public repo, for now and until changes are needed, just create a issue with an appropriate label and a descriptive message and I will take a look. Any contributions are welcome, issues where I specifically need help are marked with the contributions welcome label.

Contributing

Pull this repo and run pnpm i to install the dependencies. You can then run pnpm dev or pnpm dev:chrome to temporarily load the extension into your browser. The extension will be reloaded automatically when you make changes to most of the code.

You can pass custom web-ext arguments to the pnpm dev command by creating a .webextrc.(json|json5|yml|yaml) file in the root of the project. For more information, see Vite Plugin Web Extension's documentation.

For example to always start the dev browser on certain URLs, you can create a .webextrc.json file with the following content:

{
  "startUrl": [
    "https://www.royalroad.com/",
    "about:addons"
  ]
}

For a full list of arguments, see the web-ext command reference.