Pogovor

Tidbits from Brian King’s life

Jazz-up your Thunderbird Mail with Zemanta

Zemanta’s semantic technology has been around in Firefox for a while now via their add-on, which is just one of the tools in their set. Amongst other things it provides you with image, link, and article suggestions based on your content as you write blog posts or compose (Web)emails. This weeks sees releases that support new clients Outlook 2007 and Thunderbird, giving users of desktop mail an opportunity to use the service.

Read about the new releases.

Here I will give a quick tutorial on how to get going in Thunderbird. Versions 2 and 3 are supported. This can be incredibly fun when composting emails to friends and family, or have practical use for writing fact-finding emails.

Install

The install XPI is the same as the Firefox and Mobile, but if you want the Thunderbird listing URL, here it is:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/7571

HTML Compose

First you will have to turn HTML Compose on. In Account Settings, for each account you want to use it with, go to Composition & Addressing and check the ‘Compose messages in HTML format‘ box.

HTML Compose Setting

Send Options

Setting HTML Compose ensures you can write and see rich emails, and the next step is to ensure the recipient can also see it in it’s full glory. This means that you have to set them to receive HTML mails. The default I believe is for mixed text/html which is fine, and you will be warned if you have the wrong setting. But just to know, first go to the main Thunderbird Preferences/Options and select the Composition panel. At the bottom select the Send Options… button.

Composition Preferences

In Send Options, look for the Text Format dropdown. Choose any options except ‘Convert the message to plain text’.

Text Format

Away We Go

That’s it. Now you can go ahead and compose a great email.

Writing an email with Zemanta (click for full size)

The Zemanta ‘Content Recommendations‘ panel appears on the right side in the Compose window. This can be opened/closed via the format toolbar button. When you start writing your email, Zemanta when it has enough words will retrieve suggestions for you. Then you just need to click on the results to add/remove items from the email. It will keep checking back for changed content and refresh the recommendations.

Vanity

Guest post by Chris Neale, originally posted at : http://chrs.nl/w/8k7fm 30th January 2010

The Idea

Last Saturday, I woke up with a seemingly brilliant idea, a dot-st domain name for use by my online postage half-site Print My Postage. mypo.st was subsequently registered. However, this isn’t about that; I was on skype telling Brian (King) about this and mused that bri.ks would be a good vanity shortener for briks.si, his Mozilla Software Development Collective. Unfortunately, Kosovo’s dot-ks doesn’t actually exist; fortunately Kazakhstan’s dot-kz does. I proposed that Brian and briks.si should have their own shortener under bri.kz, with briks.si/! as the install location; why use one of the virtual servers of the hosting account purely for bri.kz, when it’s all the same server.

How Not To Register a dot-kz Domain

The fun really started after YOURLS was installed to handle the shortener system, first question: “where to register bri.kz?”, I went down the list of registrars at KazNIC (nic.kz) trying to find one with English as a language option (Cyrillic is bewildering), I settled on http://www.regtime.net/ (.kz 550 rubels per year roughly $20 in Jan 2010), although their https certificate turned out to be webnames.ru (Firefox mismatch warning good for your sanity).

Find your own dot-kz domain(s):

It turned out, that to pay the registration fee to webnames.ru I needed to use a web currency; I chose WebMoney’s WMZ [USD equivalent], signed up for an account (wmtransfer.com) only to find that I needed another account elsewhere to fund the WMZ purse at WebMoney from my credit card.

Note: this is past midnight, so now early Sunday morning.

Off to savechange.ru, signup, login, fill in WMZ purse number.

Liqpay, using Ukrainian bank with MasterCard SecureCode whatsit for verification still wanted to verify me, pending micropayments to card. The card was not good since it only tracked in GBP what with Liqpay wanting USD. So I talked to Liqpay who eventually talked to my card bank, Liqpay authorised payment, savechange converted it from USD to WMZ and I was able to pay the webnames invoice.

Technical

root .htaccess sends bri.kz traffic to briks.si/! which sends it to YOURLS to handle

/.htaccess, mod_rewrite [P] no good all referrers briks.si itself; basic redirect, again no good, no referrers at all; solution [E ..] set environment variable between redirects.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^bri\.kz$ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^(.*) http://briks.si/!/$1 [E=HTTP_REFERER:%{HTTP_REFERER}]

Conclusions

YOURLS is a good vanity shortener.

When registering a [very] foreign domain name, investigate payment methods and wait for any web currency purses to have funds before visiting the registrar.

Don’t do any of the above when half-asleep.

JPL Phase 3 - Mozilla at SXSW

So we have entered phase 3 of the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge. This will consist of continuing work for the 10 successful projects from Phase 2, culminating in the Design Camp at SWSW on 10-12 March.

Read ‘Mozilla Jetpack Design Challenge invites 10 teams to Design Camp‘ at Mozilla Labs.

The 10 chosen projects are:

Being part of the judging panel was an interesting experience because I had to put aside my technical bias (still an important factor) to take into account other criteria such as ‘Interestingness’, potential reach, UX, potential to promote Jetpack technology, potential to aid learning, and so on. Given the less than mature state of Jetpack at this point, the teams did a great job and it was difficult to choose which would go to the next stage.

We’re working out the logistics of the Design Camp now, and in the meantime the teams have to step up their game and continue with development to compete to win at the end. That’s incidental however, as they are all winners and what I am looking forward to seeing is a) how the mentors, teams, and other participants interact when put together for 3 days and b) how the projects will continue to evolve after the camp to provide real value to learners and showcase Jetpack.

Related, Mozilla will have more presence at SXSW Interactive this year. Are you a Mozillian who will attend? Go sign up and make yourself known and you might have the chance to help out in some way. Some Mozilla events to watch out for:

Wow, That’s Cool… Fun With HTML5 Video (Christopher Blizzard, Michael Dale)
What’s Open Video and Why Does It Matter? (Mark Surman, others)
Mozilla Happy Hour

More Jetpack Goodness

Herein lies some random Jetpack snippets of information.

The Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge is coming to the end of Phase 2. Judging commences today on the wonderful entries, with up to 5 teams being chosen to go to the design camp in Texas before SXSW Interactive in March.
I’ve added a tiny Jetpack to the Gallery called GeoPack that uses geolocation. Once Jetpack becomes a little more mature, and available on mobile, this would be a good candidate to add extra features to.
Zemanta has added a jetpack to their impressive toolkit. They even blogged about it!
The Jetpack Reboot is well underway, but there will be some casualties. A 0.8 release is imminent based on the current code base.

And so it ends, for now.

Introducing Flickr Find

Flickr Find in action

Did you ever need that perfect image for a presentation you were doing? Flickr Find makes it easy. Creative Commons images are returned by default, but you can make an easy change to search all images.