Lee Kelleher’s Weblog

Today is Firefox 3 Download Day! Mozilla are hoping to set a Guinness World Record for most software downloads in 24 hours.

At the time of writing, over 1.2 million people have pledged to download Firefox 3 on the Download Day!

This is a first attempt of this record, so there is no number to beat. But Mozilla want to outdo the number of Firefox 2 downloads on its launch day, which was 1.6 million! The aim is 5 million+!

Update: It’s official, Firefox 3 set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. Reaching 8,002,530 downloads! They even give me a certificate for taking part … feels like I’m back at primary school! (so proud!)

Since I started using the Operator Firefox extension a couple of week ago, I’ve found it to be a useful tool - to quickly access microformatted content; such as Contact details and Tagspaces.

Whilst I was testing it out on ReadySteadyBook, I noticed that the only tagspace was “Blog.aspx“, which seemed a bit weird. When I found the same problem on other websites, such as Amazon (example here) where the tagspace was “ref=tag_dpp_cust_itdp_t“. I thought this was a bug, so I raised a ticket on Bugzilla.

… however, I was wrong! Michael Kaply (the Operator developer) pointed me towards the Tagspaces spec.

It seems that for a rel-tag to be recognised as a tagspace it needs to have a specific URI structure:

Tags are embedded in HTTP URIs in a well-defined manner so that the tag embedded in an HTTP URI can be mechanically extracted from that URI. Specifically, the last segment of the path portion of the URI (after the final “/” character) contains the tag value. For example, the URI: http://www.example.com/tags/foo contains the tag “foo”.

This causes an issue for me. On ReadySteadyBook, the site is built using ASP.NET (1.1) on a shared web hosting environment. This means that I have no control over how the web-server (IIS) handles the page requests. For legacy reasons, IIS is configured to only map URI that have ASP.NET extensions (e.g. .aspx, .ascx, .ashx, .asmx, etc) to handled by the .NET Framework. So any “fancy permalinks” that I want to use must have one of those extensions.

At present, an example of a tagspace on ReadySteadyBook is: http://www.readysteadybook.com/Blog.aspx?tag=poetry

(The “Blog.aspx” page is quite complex, it can take all sorts of parameter to filter out it’s content - hence my reason to use the querystring)

Even if I did pretty up the URI structure to not use the querystring, at most I could get it to this: http://www.readysteadybook.com/blog/tag/poetry.aspx

Unfortunately, that still wouldn’t pass the grade with the “Masters of the Microformats”! As the tag would be defined as “poetry.aspx“, rather than “poetry“. See my dilemma?

Should I keep the rel-tag attribute on my tag links? or remove them because it conflicts with the current version of the rel-tag specification? (For other issues with the rel-tag spec, go here.)

Alternatively, I could link them to an external tagspace, such as Technorati? <snarky>oooh, they’d like that wouldn’t they!?!</snarky> A list of external tagspaces can be found here.

I’ve just installed Operator - a Firefox extension that highlights microformatted data on web pages.

So far I haven’t noticed any performance issues, and it’s been playing nicely with all my other Firefox extensions.

As a web developer, Operator makes me want to add more semantic mark-up to my websites, (which I already try to do). This extension will make it easier for testing purposes.

I decided to read more about the extension on the developer’s blog - to which I was pleasantly surprised to find that it uses my Category Cloud widget (plug-in for WordPress). Along with a kudos-link back to my personal website. (Thanks Mike!)

A while ago I was curious to how many people were using my Category Cloud widget plug-in, so I added an opt-out “powered by” link. This way I could check my referrals or Google results count for “Powered by Category Cloud”.

I’ve been amazed by the outcome of this. I honestly thought that everyone would opt-out of the link, yet they didn’t! So now my PageRank has increased; I’m in the Technorati Top 10K (which I definitely don’t deserve!); and I get a steady flow of traffic (low, but consistent).

I’ve tried to support the Category Cloud widget as best I can… so maybe it’s good karma?

We’ve got an old laptop that we keep under the coffee table, so that we can quickly check IMDb or Wikipedia for mid-conversations things (very geeky I know!)

Since Katelyn arrived, we’ve been using it for web-cam too.

Yesterday we were having a few problems with voice chat on MSN, so we installed Skype on the laptop.

A couple of clicks later, Skype was installed, all was good. Then about 5 mins later I notice a little Skype toolbar at the top of Firefox! Very very sneaky!!!

There were no options during the install to let me opt-in/out of adding the Firefox Extension! Bad Skype!

I’m not impressed by companies who try to sneakily install additional software just because you use related software… *cough* Apple Safari *cough* (The number of people I’ve spoke to about it didn’t know how it got on their computers!)

I do know that Apple at least give you an opt-out of Safari (as they pre-select the checkbox for you) - but Skype didn’t even offer that choice!

Regardless of how useful the Skype Firefox Extension is… I’ve uninstalled it - just because I can!

I used all sorts of add-ons and extensions for Firefox, (I’ll get around to writing a blog post on that soon too). Since I do a lot of web-development, I switch between Firefox and Internet Explorer frequently during a build.

To make this easier, I’ve been using Grayson Mixon’s IE View Lite. But with the latest upgrade (version 1.3.2), it broke in Firefox 2.0! (This made me sad)

I’d been holding out for the next upgrade - to see if that would fix the problem… but nothing came.

So I emailed Grayson to see if there was a potential fix in a future release; which he promptly replied:

IE View Lite 1.3.2 and 1.3.3 are Firefox 3 only. If you want to continue using Firefox 2, you should use IE View Lite 1.3.1, the only difference being compatibility updates for Firefox 3 that broke backward compatibility.

I’ve now uninstalled version 1.3.2 - reverting back to 1.3.1 - and everything is good again! (Thanks Grayson).

It does concern me that support was dropped for Firefox 2.0 in favour of version 3 (which is still only in beta) - cutting out a large proportion of the user-base. But I guess once Firefox 3 has shipped, no one will be bothered anyway.

I feel like I’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of months.  I’ve only just heard about Mozilla’s Prism - and it’s already changing the way I use web-apps.

Prism, (previously called WebRunner), is essentially a Site Specific Browser (SSB) - meaning that it’s a desktop application designed to host a single web-application.  This is good for many reasons, foremost it causes less distractions.

So far, I have prisms set-up for most of the Google apps that I regularly use: Google Mail, Google Calendar and Google Reader.   Now each of these web-applications are not open as separate tabs in my Firefox, but as individual desktop applications.  (Now I don’t have to worry about finding my Gmail tab in Firefox, nor about browser-crashes.)

It reminds of Microsoft attempted to do with HTA - but it seemed more difficult to interface them with external web-applications.

You can read more about Mozilla Prism on their Lab’s blog. [http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/10/prism/]