Someday Firefox and Mozilla will be one glorified application (Ok, kidding, we’ve been there). But until we go back there, Thunderbird will have tabs.
Category: What I do
NASA ditches IE in favor of Firefox
According to Dan Turner “NASA has given up entirely on Internet Explorer. Now every time you go to a page using IE, you get up to three prompts telling you how risky it is to run scripts. The official line is that the newest IE vulnerability was the proverbial straw, and now NASA’s standard browser is Firefox.“
Paris Meetup Details
Looks like we got ourselves a venue for the all-in-one Les Blogs/Flock/Bar Camp/Word Press/Riya Meetup! So, tonight, Sunday, December 4, 2005 @ 19h05 at the Lizard Lounge (18, rue du Bourg-Tibourg, 75004 Paris). Should be a pretty good crowd, so if you’re in the area stop on by!
technorati tags: paris, barcamp, wordpress, flock, riya, meetup
Downhill Battle folks launch Explorer Destroyer and Kill Bill’s Browser
There’s a big chance right now to switch people to Firefox and it might not last very long — Microsoft has a new version of Internet Exlporer on the way and lord knows what they’ll be doing in Vista to force people to use it. Firefox has to get a big foothold right now.
If you have a blog or website and are pissed off having to deal with IE6 users or if you just care about open-source and the public interest, now is the time to really take the internet back.
Mozilla built us a wonderful tool. Google gave us a carrot. Now take the stick and beat IE’s ass.
Explorer Destroyer – Switch to Firefox
Yeah, this is cool. And I love that my friends from Downhill Battle are behind it. They’re such badasses.
And props to Firefox on turning one years old!
technorati tags: downhill battle, firefox, spreadfirefox, explorerdestroyer, badass, opensource
Helping nonprofits and NGOs join the digital revolution
All this past week, TechSoup, a technology provider for nonprofits, has been running an online gathering to degeek current technologies that encourage openness, collaboration and sharing. Over the course of a week, they’ve covered topics like:
- RSS Syndication: What, Why and How?
- Social Bookmarking for Nonprofits
- Tagging 101
- Personal Aggregation: Social Bookmarking, Feedreaders, etc.
- Widgets and AJAX applications
On top of that, they’ve very wisely started a resource on NetSquared for cataloging successes that nonprofits have found putting technology to use:
Has your organization solved a problem, reached new heights, or re-energized its base — thanks to a digital trick or two? Have you seen another organization use technology to help accomplish its goals? We want to hear these stories, and we want you to share them with other non-profit leaders.
TechSoup will also hosting an event called Net Tuesday Tuesday, November 8, 2005 in San Francisco to continue the dialog about how nonprofits can leverage technology in their respective missions.
On top of events and microconferences like Aspiration Tech‘s annual Open Source Usability Sprint, CompuMentor’s Nonprofit Technology Roundtable Series and the Craigslist Foundation Bootcamp, it seems like it’s a very good time to be a nonprofit looking to get started with open technology!
technorati tags: nptech, nonprofits, techsoup, compumentor, web2.0
Supah Cheap CSS Dropshadow Hack
So I came up with my very own stupid CSS hack to do dropshadows in Flock (and by reverse extension, Firefox). It’s very much a hack and not one that I would generally recommend unless in very small quantities, but I like it because a) I invented it and b) it works for meª.
So how does it work? Well, it’s fairly simple, actually (and would work even better with a little Javascript-foo).
So take any block level element, something like an h1 or h2, give it a class of “dropshadow” and (ready for the hack?) add a span tag inside the block with a title that is identical to the text of the object. Something like this:
<h1>And another for good measure</h1>
Now here’s the CSS you need (add it to the head of your document:
.dropshadow {
color: #fff;
margin:0;
padding:0;
position: relative;
z-index: 1
}
.dropshadow span {
position: absolute;
top: 1px;
left: 1px;
color: #000;
z-index: -1;
-moz-opacity: 0.50;
}
.dropshadow span:after {content: attr(title);}
It works by taking your original text, positioning it relatively and then elevating it to the Z-index of 1. Then we generate the same text from the title attribute of the span, sets the Z-index to –1 and absolutely positions it snugly beneath the the original text. Give it a –moz-opacity of something between 0.00 and 1.00 and you’ve got a crisp dropshadow! You can of course also change the top and left values to move the dropshadow around.
Technorati Tags: css, dropshadow, css3
CSS3 Columns in Flock
After doing a little investigating, it turns out Firefox 1.5 already supports pretty much what I’m looking for. And given that Flock is based on Firefox, that means we get to use it! How’s that for serendipity?
So check it out. I made a little demo for
those of you running Firefox 1.5 or Flock. Otherwise, here’s a screencap of how it looks. Check out the source of the demo to see how this is done. Basically all you need is this:
.content {
- moz- column- width: 16em;
- moz- column- gap: 2em;
}
And here are some other resources:
Geeky Things
I’ve had a couple things cross my radar recently that I’d like to see be improved somehow… either in Flock (or browsers in general), RSS aggregators or blogging tools.
Better Reading through Columnization
Which do you prefer? I think it’s quite apparent that Tofu makes reading webpages and blog posts infinitely easier and more enjoyable. So where’s the Firefox extension? Huh huh? I guarentee you this will get into Flock eventually… if not my next RSS aggregator. Or both…?
Well, looks like the recent Firefox betas already have this. Now to just see some smart Tofu-like uses of this feature!
DOM state in history
With all the hoopla about AJAX-based interfaces, it’s about time that browsers get keen to the fact that the DOM state is part of your history. It’s not some scripty side-effect — no, when I use the back button, I expect the page to be in the same state that I left it. This should be the case whether I navigate off to some other page or close the window or tab. The only way to restore the state of a page back to its original state should occur if I clear my history or exit out of my browser (or somehow reset the DOM through some other intentional mechanism).
And this should exist in the browser because it’s the thing that’s storing my path history. So what does it mean when the browser adds DOM state to my history? For example, when I use Gmail and navigate off to some other page and then return, I would no longer lose the email I was reading or composing. In fact, I could even load up Gmail in a new tab or window and find myself in the same place where I left off. Which is exactly what I want.
So the effect would be in effect to maintain your session state across tabs, windows… no matter where you are or what you’re doing, the browser would be staying with you, never skipping a beat, making sure that every little action you took was recorded and there for you to return to until you decided to start afresh.
It’s time the browser got wise to the current state of web application design. If not to encourage the further development of fast webapps like Basecamp or Flickr, but to make the browser reflect user expectations about the purpose of the back button!
Blogbars
The last thing on my list concerns a rather recent feature that Matt just launched on WordPress.com. It’s just like the Blogger toolbar, except that his bar applies to WordPress.com account holders instead of general visitors. It’s a good start, but I think it can be better. He’s open to ideas — as am I. How can this tool help you blog better?
Hmm, if only the browser could facilitate blogging somehow… heh.
Technorati Tags: blogbar, wordpress, ajax, readability, tofu
What of this silly little invite-only idea?
I’ve received a couple invites from folks for Google Talk, Google’s new instant messaging service. The funny thing is that it requires a Gmail username and password to make use of the software, which, like other Google software, only runs on Windows. Now you’ll recall, too, that Gmail is an invite-only system. This would make for some rather troublesome exclusivity in the service if it weren’t for the fact that you can talk to your buddies on other IM services.
So here’s what’s interesting about this, and something I wonder about personally given Flock’s current “private beta”: what results are had by using such an invite-based system to grow your userbase and social network? What are the costs and benefits, and to whom? There are myriad reasons for busting out with a fully public beta but just as many for going private, which is, admittedly, different than exclusive (Flock is the former, Gmail the latter).
To limit your system to invited participants, you must certainly have something of both legitimate and substantial value to create demand… that actually incents invitees to sign up and login. But you also must not upset or invite the bitter ire of those who haven’t yet received invites.
And quite obviously, as we learned over the past week, once you’ve extended an invite, especially in the world of software where there is hardly such a thing as scarcity of resources, what you giveth, you nary can take away.
So what of all these invite-only (or formally invite-only) services where you have to know someone on the inside to get a golden ticket? Does it artificially increase desire? Does it help services grow organically and cut down on trolls and spam, creating more value for invitees? Does it create more investment from the user community and perhaps establish even minor connections between invitor and invitee? Or does it create a false hierarchy around an inner circle of well-connected geeks?
Who knows?
What I do know is that it’s a curious trend and happening rather profusely across the web. Good or bad? I can’t quite say — except that in the case of Flock, we’re using the invite system to start out slowly on purpose. We want to not only be able to scale up organically, but we also want to cultivate relationships with our brave early adopters so that we can build the best experience possible over time. And to that end — we want to make sure that when we do launch publicly, we’ve hammered out all the glaring issues — as well as minor ones — so that sum total Flock makes you more productive, more explorative, and more voraciously social on the web. So for now, Flock will remain available to few kindred souls with enough courage to shove through our bugs and dodge the sharp edges. In the meantime, do add yourself to our invite lottery so that your name will be there when the next round of invites go out!
Why microformats are the glue between web content and a richer online experience
In response to my introduction, Andy Hume asked me on the Microformats-discuss list:
What kind of microformat support are you looking to get in to these publishing tools? Obviously wordpress has built in support for XFN. What else are you trying to get happening?
So now it’s time for me to put on my visionary cap and mention a couple ideas I’ve been stewing on about why microformats make good sense for web publishers and web tool builders. I won’t get too pedantic or preach to the choir. Rather, I’m just gunna outline some of the obvious things to me that make creating the lowercase “semantic web” worthwhile, assuming, of course, that certain enabling technologies and innovations occur.
First, let me point out that the cost of implementing microformats is less than minimal and in fact, in some cases, can give you a net gain given the reduction on time spent figuring out what CSS classes to use. As a former-web-developer-junkie, it was my job to come up with unoriginal ways of identity bits of content on webpages so that I or someone else could come back later and figure out what the heck I was doing.
This lead to me to do things like code lists of people with a container that specified that, indeed, I was working with a list of people and not dates, dogs or envelopes. Why would this be useful? Well, what if you wanted to use a different icon to denote a person, date, dog or envelope? You’d need to know what class of object you were working with. (Just bear with me here.) This becomes a pain when you have to do this over and over again and or work on someone else’s code. However, with a sufficient store of standard microformats at our disposal, such situations could theoretically be avoided. Rather than having to reinvent a classing system everytime, I could simply turn to the related microformat standard and call it a day.
So that’s great and all, but why do you bother touching code anymore anyway with such able CMS and blog tools available? Why not just bake it into those publishing tools and be done with it?
The short answer is that that’s happening, and we need to see more of this work get done. The problem seems to be related to chickens, eggs, carts and horses, in no particular order. And until they all get sorted out, there’s a great deal of developer apathy best captured in lines like, “Why should I care?”
Well, better than just spouting out about the practical benefits for web developers, there are functional benefits which I expect to see available in the coming months. As a prelimary example, check this out:
I created a Greasemonkey user script that will find those hCalendar events and provide a link to import them into any calendar program that supports the iCalendar format (most notably Apple’s iCal and Mozilla’s Sunbird). What does this mean? Well any time you see an event on the web that has hCalendar information, you can click a link and it’ll be added to your calendar so you don’t have to copy the information by hand.
So just imagine once this kind of support becomes native in the browser… that’s when really interesting things start to become possible. And soon, I’ll outline just how I see this happening.
Factory Joe 
