Easy Firefox

Archive for September, 2009

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Thank you to each and everyone of you who participated in and helped promote Mozilla Service Week!    The Mozilla community didn’t disappoint – thousands of you got out, and made a difference in our communities and the Web. Kudos to all!

Now it’s time to see how we did.  Please take a moment to report your hours and share your stories by Sept. 25th (we’ll start displaying completed hours on our site tomorrow). We’re throwing in a little memento for those that do this!

Wondering what’s next?  Today is OneWebDay, a global celebration of the Web — which is a wonderful way to wrap up Mozilla Service Week!  Here’s how to celebrate:

• Print and share an ‘I love the web poster’. Or change your twitter of Facebook pic! Create a global wave that shows the Web is a precious public resource.
• Conduct an Internet Health Check. Find computers with Internet Explorer 6, and upgrade them to a more secure browser.
• Find a OneWebDay party or celebration near you!
• Donate to OneWebDay. Every time you donate, Mozilla will too.

Thanks for making a difference this week!  We’re hoping the spirit lives on all year long.

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How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. Anne Frank

Today marks the last day of Mozilla Service Week.  We hope you’ve had an amazing time this past week, getting out in your communities and helping organizations and individuals better use the Web.  You don’t have to miss out on Mozilla Service Week — there’s still plenty to do!

• On your lunch hour or after work host a Web help desk at a local cafe, at your company or at school.  All you need is a laptop,  a sign and wireless wireless!
• Conduct an Internet Health Audit for a few friends or colleagues.  We’ve made the audit even easier, just visit our Health Check page and you’ll know if you need to update your browser.
• Find a service opportunity on Idealist.org or on Betterplace.org (if you’re in Germany) and start helping a non-profit when you have the time. You can also scroll through some of the stories and projects posted on the Mozilla Service Week website.

If you need some inspiration check out how other community members have heeded the call:

• Anjan Kumar Das of India has set up a website for the The Uttar Banga Anath Ashram orphanage.  The founder Uma Mallick scrapes by to care for, feed and educate 28 girls.  Mr. Das helped set up her website to in order to raise funds and awareness for this cause.  Great work!
• Joe McLaughlin has helped bring the Millvale Library (near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) to life by refurbishing computers and getting the library online.  Nice job!
• Abhinav Kishhore of India has taken the Web help desk idea online,  creating a help request form.  He’s volunteering to follow up and help you with your specific tech needs!  Creative take on the Web help desk.

Have a great last day of Mozilla Service Week and get ready to celebrate OneWebDay on September 22nd!

Yale Students for Free Culture help spread the word about the Open Web for Mozilla Service Week

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A while back I wrote a post about Firefox that concluded with the idea that each one of us should be the center of our online lives — not a company, not an application, not a business plan. One common response has been: That sounds awesome, but how do we get there? Where do we start?

Well, no surprise — I start with the browser. The browser is the piece of the web that human beings interact with directly; it’s the tool through which people “touch” the web. I have an immense degree of control over my browser. With a website I have the degree of control the website chooses to offer. I am one of many users at a website, but the browser is mine.

These traits make the browser the logical tool for a user -centric (”you-centric” ??) world.

An early step was customizing the browser by hand, adding extensions, bookmarks, settings, themes and personas. More recently browsers have begun offering automated customization as well. For example, the Smart Location Bar (aka the “awesome bar”) automatically offers easy access to websites we’ve visited before, automatically tuning to each person’s browsing habits.

The awesome bar presents automated customization to the user. It aggregates information about my usage across many websites and presents the information back to me. It’s immensely helpful. One area to explore in building a user-centric web experience is other examples where this sort of automated customization would help the user. For example, perhaps knowing my own search history across many website would be helpful to me.

Another form of automated activity to explore is the presentation of customized or individual responses outward, to websites. For example, the browser could automate the current dysfunctional process of logging into and out of websites. There are unquestionably other things we do regularly that the browser can automate and run in the background. Sharing of information is becoming increasingly common. Perhaps the browser could automate response to certain types of requests. There are obviously privacy and control issues with sharing information. That’s why the browser — where I have the most control — is a logical choice.

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We’ve just got three days left of Mozilla Service Week. It’s not too late to help!  Let’s take this weekend to get out and show people how to use the Web.  It’s easy — all you need is a sign, your laptop and a venue with wireless and you’re an instant Web help desk!

This week isn’t just about helping people better use the Web, but about celebrating as well.  That’s why we’ve paired up with OneWebDay to wrap up Mozilla Service Week.  OneWebDay is like Earth Day for the Internet. It’s a chance to celebrate the awesomeness of the Web, and make it better.

Here’s how you can celebrate your hardwork this week and the Web in general:

• Print and share an ‘I love the web poster’. Create a global wave that shows the web is a precious public resource.
• Conduct an Internet Health Check. Find computers with Internet Explorer 6, and upgrade them to a more secure browser.
• Find a OneWebDay party or celebration near you!
• Donate to OneWebDay. Every time you donate, Mozilla will too.

Have fun meeting and connecting with the other people that care about the Web.  And, as a gentle reminder, please share your stories and hours on Mozilla Service Week!

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You might not know the name Anthony Lieuallen, but I bet you have heard of Greasemonkey before.  It is the Firefox extension that allows you to extend or customize your favorite web sites in a number of different ways. 

Anthony is one of the driving forces behind that project, so I thought it would be fun to pick his brain to find out what his part in the project is, and what advice he might have for other hopeful Greasemonkey script writers or Firefox add-on developers.

What all have you done in development for the Firefox Greasemonkey extension?

I’ve definitely lost track of when and how exactly I first learned about Greasemonkey, and when I got involved.  Luckily, I can look up enough old records to get a pretty good idea of what the right answer here is.

I first interacted with Greasemonkey as a user.  Quickly though I graduated to User Script author.  My earliest blog post about a script I authored was in March of 2005.  I wrote a few scripts, some quite popular, for a while.  By June, Mark Pilgrim contacted me about being included in the "Greasemonkey Hacks" book, essentially a cookbook-like collection of existing User Scripts, with discussion about what they were and how they worked.  I was included as a contributor when that book was published.

I am first credited in a commit message from November, 2006.  That’s when I first began development of Greasemonkey itself, nearly three years ago.  At the time, the original creator, Aaron Boodman, was very much in charge and I was minimally involved.  Over time, I became more and more involved in the development process.

The first change I made to the source code directly, rather than submitting to the maintainers and being recognized for, was in February of 2007.  It was a very gradual process from there, but by some time in 2008 I was one of the more recognized authorities within the development community.  Finally, in August of 2009, the project’s original creator stepped down from the role of primary developer, handing the reins to myself and Johan Sundström, leaving me in the "co-lead" role with Johan.

Development progress over time has been relatively slow.  On one hand, Greasemonkey serves its purpose quite well, so doesn’t need to change very much.  On the other, there was a more complicated and difficult process for agreeing to and including changes.  Now that I’m more "in charge" than ever, I (along with Johan) am hoping to make it easier for Greasemonkey to progress, in the future.

As far as scripting and coding goes, how did you get started and what would you suggest somebody who wants to write their own Greasemoney script or Firefox add-on go to learn more on how to do so?

I’ve been programming since I was 10 or 11 years old.  Even earlier than that, I did "programming" by typing source code from a magazine into the Atari BASIC interpreter.  By my teens I was writing little programs, and by college I was beginning to learn PHP.  I got involved heavily in web development, and have been doing that professionally for six years now.

I was interested in Firefox extension development from the word go. Back in the 1.x days, however, tutorials and documentation was sparse, varied, and confusing.  Luckily today these problems have been solved. Mechanisms in Firefox 2 and 3 help make extension development easier, and both documentation and examples are much easier to find and understand.

I actually tried, and failed, to make my own extensions a few times. I finally got my first one running in June of 2005. Since then I’ve made a few of my own, and gotten involved with Greasemonkey.  For new extension authors, the developer.mozilla.org site is definitely the place to go, today.

User scripts are a different beast, and thankfully quite a bit simpler.  If you know javascript, you can probably get your first user script working in just a few minutes.  To learn how, visit the Greasespot Wiki, specifically the Manual.  The "common pitfalls" article by Mark Pilgrim is also very useful.

As an add-on developer, is there anything else you wish that the Mozilla team provided, or do you feel pretty happy with the information and support that they provide to developers?

It’s hard to say.  At this point, I’m a seasoned developer, so most of what I need is in my head.  There are two things that I would really like though:

Something like xulplanet.com’s XPCOM reference. The xulplanet.com site is now dead, giving just a link to the general developer wiki.  This is a good and helpful wiki, *but* has two weaknesses: it covers many disjoint topics (i.e. both web development, and extension development), and lacks the coverage that xulplanet.com
had.  There are many interfaces that, now, are harder to discover and understand.  Since xulplanet went away, I’ve found myself resorting to reading the source directly, which is more difficult to navigate to, and more difficult to read.

Better support for venkman. Venkman, the javascript debugger, was once quite wonderful.  Today, it’s often difficult to find the file you want to access (sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not) and almost impossible to find those that are/are referenced by javascript components.  Venkman seems to have bitrotted a bit.  Personally, even for web development, I strongly prefer it to Firebug for script debugging — it provides a multi-paneled interface that is significantly easier to use, than that of Firebugs, which is designed to fit in that tiny band at the bottom of the browser.

How big of a roll has working on Firefox add-ons played in your professional life?

Almost none.  I interviewed for, but ultimately did not accept one position that would have been FF extension development.  My previous job did include creation of one extension, a port of the IE specific add-on that the company made, but was a secondary/side role.

What Firefox add-ons or Greasemonkey scripts are you a fan of?

For extensions, I like FireBug and Firecookie, JSONView, Open In Browser, and Web Developer extensions.

Most of the user scripts I use, I wrote myself.  Of those I find Linkify Plus and Submit in Select to be indispensible.  But I also use Check Range, and Google Reader Quick Links.

For more information on Anthony, what he does and his work – be sure to check out his personal site Arantius.com.  To check out all the Firefox add-ons he has been a part of, you can also check out his profile page on the Mozilla Add-ons web site.  From all the Firefox fans, I would also like to thank Anthony for the work he has done to (in the long run) make Firefox a better browser for all.

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© Mitch Keeler 2008 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!

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Today the Snowl team released Snowl 0.3, the third major release of the messaging-in-the-browser experiment. The release features closer integration with Firefox’s existing feed functionality and many improvements to the list view to make it easier to subscribe to and follow feeds.

Visit the announcement blog post to see the Snowl discussion group, or join them for discussion in the #labs IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org.

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The Snowl team has released Snowl 0.3, the third major release of the messaging-in-the-browser experiment. The release features closer integration with Firefox’s existing feed functionality and many improvements to the list view to make it easier to subscribe to and follow feeds.

For more information, see the release announcement blog post.

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I’ve been reading about Anthony and Lucas’s trip to their local library as part of Mozilla Service Week. Only a few people came to their “Ask a Geek” table, but Anthony describes a memorably experience nonetheless. I realized that my local library might be a good place to do this as well. It’s on the San Francisco peninsula, but not in Palo Alto or Mountain View, and has a community that isn’t entirely techie. And the library is near the local high school, and I think it fills up with high school students in the afternoon.

One of our mighty system administrators lives in the same town, is an active LUG organizer, and is the perfect person to join me. Now all I have to do is go talk to the library folks and see how welcoming they will be! Also, if anyone wants to join us in the mid-peninsula area drop me a note here.

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Its day 3 of Mozilla Service Week, and already so many of you have been making a big difference. We’re now past 11,000 hours of pledged support, with so many great volunteer opportunities and projects posted. We wanted to share a few of those today:

* Urban Sprouts based in San Francisco, USA is looking for a volunteer web designer and CSS/HTML web developer to update their blog. They run a school garden program that serves low-income youth from under-served neighborhoods, teaching and sharing eco-literacy, wellness, and community.

* The BBC have teamed up Find Your Feet in the UK, a charity working with vulnerable families living in rural India and Malawi. They are helping Find Your Feet with redesigning their website, and offering some guidance using social media, plus lots more.

* andrewl is supporting livinghome.org in Minnesota, who enable seniors to remain living in the home of their choice. He’ll be improving their website and producing a short video, so more people get to know about livinghome.org, and help find new volunteers.

* www.breadforthecity.org are looking for help to bring their existing blog site together with their website. Bread for the City provides  assistance to Washington DC’s poorest residents and write daily about the problems of poverty and potential solutions.

You can read about more offers of support and asks for help at the service week Stories and Inspiration area.

There are still so many ways you can get involved with Mozilla Service Week this week. Visit Idealist.org and view opportunities by country and region, and if you’re in Germany please see projects which need help at Betterplace.org. You can also scroll through some of the stories and projects posted on the Mozilla Service Week website.

Thanks for your support, and please know that no matter how big or small your act of good – you are making a big difference.

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