I recently had a web page with a long list of Twitter names that were not linked, like @mattcutts. I thought that someone has to have made a Chrome extension that would “linkify” names so they would be clickable like @mattcutts. And with a little bit of searching, I found twlinkfy.
It looked like a great extension, but Chrome (at least in Windows) can only install Chrome extensions from the Chrome Web Store in order to protect against malware.
So how would you go from source code on GitHub to an installed Chrome extension? Here’s how I did it: download the extension as a .zip by looking for the “Download ZIP” button on the right-hand side of the project page on GitHub. Now extract/unzip the code somewhere. Then in Chrome go to Menu (the three lines)->More tools->Extensions. Click the “Developer mode” checkbox and then click the button labeled “Load unpacked extension…”.
Now navigate in the resulting file dialog box until you are in the directory with a manifest.json file. For me, it was in the twlinkfy-master/ext directory. And that’s it! The extension loaded, and when I loaded the page with a long list of @names as text, they turned into clickable links.
You can even modify the local source code and reinstall or reload the extension. For example, I changed line 10 of twlinkfy.js to point to a different destination page on Twitter for links. I uninstalled and re-installed the extension and then the links went to a different page on Twitter.
As always, be careful of extensions/code that you install in case someone is attempting something malicious.