Save the sites you browse in a Pinterest board.

This write-up assumes you know how to create a JavaScript Pinterest Clone from scratch. If you don’t know how, watch the tutorial here.

For this tutorial, we are simply upgrading the functionality of our JavaScript Pinterest Clone and integrating it into a Chrome Extension.

Part 1. Integration

Let’s go over our file structure.

We’ll start with the manifest.json.

{  “name”: “Pinterest Chrome Extension”,  “description”: “Pinterest Chrome Extension”,  “version”: “0.1.0”,  “manifest_version”: 2,  “icons”: {    “16”: “./images/icon-16x16.png”,    “32”: “./images/icon-32x32.png”,    “48”: “./images/icon-48x48.png”,    “128”: “./images/icon-128x128.png”  },  “background”: {    “scripts”: [“./scripts/background.js”]  },  “browser_action”: {    “default_popup”: “popup.html”  },  “permissions”: [    “tabs”,    “storage”,    “unlimitedStorage”,    “https://*/*png",    “https://*/*jpg",    “https://*/*jpeg",…

Let’s get the skeleton for our component written up. We’ll be using ‘react-router-dom’ and font awesome for this project.

<div className=”nav_bar”>  <div className=”icon_container menu_switch”>  </div>  <div className={`nav_container`}>    <div className=”icon_container logo”>    </div>    <ul className=”menu_items”>    </ul>  </div></div>

We have a place for our open/close menu button, a logo, and the menu with links to different pages.

Opening and closing our menu

When the user clicks our menu button, we’ll open or close our menu depending on the current state of the menu.

We’ll have a piece of state called showMenu to manage this.

const [showMenu, setShowMenu] = useState(false);function switch_menu() {  setShowMenu(!showMenu);
}

When showMenu is…

We’ll build this webpage in 3 main parts:

1. Top — the greeting for our customer

2. Middle — a place for information about our business’ mission

3. Bottom — a footer for information about our business

We’ll create a Home.js component for our main page.

The Top

All we’re going to do here is set an image for our background and title for our company.

The image gallery comes later; it’s a separate element that we float around our page depending on the dimensions.

<div className=”section1">  <img src=”./images/background-section1.jpg” alt=”” 
    className=”background_image_section1" />  <div className=”title”>Sinclaire<br />Market</div></div>

This is our result:

We’ll build this webpage in 3 parts:

1. Top — the greeting for our customer

2. Middle — a place for information about our business’ mission

3. Bottom — a sign-up option and footer for information about our business

The Top.

All we’re going to do here is set a bunch of images in place and write a greeting.

<div className=”section1" ><img src=”./images/space.png” alt=”” className=”space-background”/><img src=”./images/earth.png” alt=”” className=”earth”/><img src=”./images/rocket.png” alt=”” className=”rocket-ship”/><img src=”./images/planet1.png” alt=”” className=”planet1"/><img src=”./images/satellite.png” alt=”” className=”satellite”/><div className=”greeting”>[Welcome]</div></div>

It’s important in the CSS styles for all of these images that we make sure they have a position of ‘fixed’ and are positioned using the ’top’ property.

This important for later when we use our Parallax HOC Wrapper to make these…

This tutorial uses a boilerplate Google Chrome Extension setup. If you want to know how to get that setup, check out our write-up here:

The Rundown

We’ll have a simple HTML page that allows our user to pick a search engine; this page will be the popup in our Chrome Extension.

In the foreground script we’ll listen for when the user copies a piece of text. When they do, we’ll get our background script to open a new with the appropriate URL and search parameter.

Let’s start.

Our manifest.json

Nothing special here.

{ “name”: “Clipboard Search”, “manifest_version”: 2, “description”: “Testing clipboard functionality.”, “version”: “0.0.0”…

Add parallax elements to your next web design.

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The general solution we’re working with is this:

We are going to create an HOC (Higher Order Component).

It’s a function that’s going to take a JSX Element.

ex. higherOrderFunction(<div></div>)

It’s then going to return a JSX Component.

ex. ParallaxComponent

We’ll then render it to our page like this:

<ParallaxComponent />

The logic for “parallaxing” is this:

We are going to fix a JSX element to our page (in this case a DIV shaped like a circle).

When we scroll our page DOWN, we’ll manually scroll the JSX element UP.

Since we are manually scrolling our element up, we can control how fast or slow it…

Get started with a Pinterest clone. No external libraries needed.

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We’ll build our mock-up in steps.

1. Create a mock-up of a single Pinterest Pin.
2. Create a mock-up of the Pinterest “Add a Pin Screen”.
3. Merge the above; Use the “Add Pin Screen” to generate a single Pinterest Pin.
4. Transfer the logic of our merge in step 3 into our Pinterest Layout.

“Pinterest Pin” Mock-Up

Each Pin is made up of 3 sections.

1. Pin title — the user won’t see this; you can use this on the back-end as a way to store the Pin in a database
2. …

We’ll only need 2 Components

A ‘PinterestLayout.js’ component that we’ll use for the Pinterest board.

A ‘Card.js’ component that we’ll use for the actual pins on the board.

Let’s write the PinterestLayout component

It’s a very simple component:

function PinterestLayout() {
 return (
 <div style={styles.pin_container}>
 </div>
 )
}

The container is what powers our entire layout.

const styles = {
 pin_container: {
 margin: 0,
 padding: 0,
 width: ‘80vw’,
 display: ‘grid’,
 gridTemplateColumns: ‘repeat(auto-fill, 250px)’,
 gridAutoRows: ‘10px’,
 position: ‘absolute’,
 left: ‘50%’,
 transform: ‘translateX(-50%)’,
 justifyContent: ‘center’,
 backgroundColor: ‘black’
 }
}

Note:

• margin — simply used to normalize our container
• padding — simply used to normalize our container
• width — this boundary will determine…