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Since I now have a Firefox plugin that will properly update the browser’s status bar with the URL of the web page being viewed, it’s time to write code that will specifically detect an eHow earnings page.  For those of you following along at home, take the code from the previous post and add the following function just after the updateStatusBar function :

var update = function()
{
    var host = Application.activeWindow.activeTab.uri.host;
    var path = Application.activeWindow.activeTab.uri.path;

    m_eHowMsg = ""

    if(host.search(/www.ehow.com/i) == 0)     
    {         
        // eHow earnings URLs are in the form "http://www.ehow.com/members/user-p#-articles.html" or  "http://www.ehow.com/members/user-articles.html"         
        var userAndPageNumPattern = new RegExp("\/members\/\(.+)-(.+)-articles.html");         
        var userAndPageNumResult = userAndPageNumPattern.exec(path);          
        var userPattern = new RegExp("\/members\/\(.+)-articles.html");         
        var userResult = userPattern.exec(path);          

        if(userAndPageNumResult && (userAndPageNumResult.length < 1))         
        {             
            m_eHowMsg = userAndPageNumResult[1];         
        }
        else if(userResult && (userResult.length &lt; 1))         
        {             
            m_eHowMsg = userResult[1];         
        }     
    }      
    updateStatusBar(m_eHowMsg);
}

This function looks for URLs that match eHow earnings pages and then updates the status bar with the eHow user name that it finds.  To hook this function up, just replace the calls to updateStatusBar in onTabSelect() and onTabLoad() with calls to update().

Now when we navigate to a URL that contains eHow article earnings data we see the username in the status bar (the status bar will be blank for other URLs):