
Show HN: A Chrome extension that enables Twitter's 280-length limit for everyone - kossnocorp
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tweet-280-today/ngcdmmagiaedbonjbdnbhfaoeklgiddn
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kossnocorp
You probably heard of it: Twitter increases the limit up to 240. They enabled
it for a part of the users, and I wasn't lucky enough to get into the testing
group. As a developer of an app that helps to build tweetstorms I was excited
and terrified, so I've decided to explore how the Twitter experiments code
works. It turned out to be easy to enable the experiment: it's just a matter
of adding `weighted_character_count: true` to the request. I've tried to post
280-length tweets via API but with no luck. Apparently, this trick works only
at twitter.com.

So I've decided to build a Google Chrome extension that will hijack the
Twitter code and enable the experiment automatically. I've used
`MutationObserver` API to watch for DOM and update the div with the initial
data JSON before the app reads it. Works like a charm with a single exception:
the counter doesn't work and always display "140". The code is open sourced,
so you can see how it works internally:
[https://github.com/kossnocorp/tweet280/blob/master/src/exten...](https://github.com/kossnocorp/tweet280/blob/master/src/extension/index.js)

