Wordpress Browser Update

Well, it is not a surprise really, as WordPress has been doing great things for the Web to move it forward since it’s inception. They are Open Source. The platform gets better and better with each release. They have a viable business via Automattic. WordPress and Firefox have always played nice together. There are plenty of add-ons available to enhance your WordPress experience. I could go on…

I don’t know what they are doing with old versions of other browsers, but am sure it is something similar and equally sensible.

Image by jmtosses via Flickr

Last week saw Firefox updated to version 7. I’m not sure if other communities party any more with the rapid release cycle, but we used it as an excuse not only to party but to talk about the latest happenings with Mozilla. Web Hour (Spletne urice in Slovene), our beloved technology meetup that happens every Wednesday, was hijacked for this purpose. We moved location for once to try something different, and were graciously welcomed by our hosts Zemanta in their fancy new offices in the middle of Ljubljana. Big shout out to Rok and Gasper for going the extra mile in organisation.

For the schedule, we wanted to cover the latest important happenings and projects in Mozilla. Even though it was Firefox release day, the general theme was that the Web is evolving fast, and so is Mozilla to meet the challenges. While 5 years ago focus in Mozilla shifted almost wholly to Firefox, the wheel has turned again and Firefox is just one tool of many (though still the most important) to keep the Web open and fight for users.

SCHEDULE

Nino and I split the speaking duties. Nino, the youngest Mozilla Slovenia member showed off why he makes a fine Mozilla Rep.

• Firefox Release Channels
• New Developer Tools
• B2G
• WebFWD
• ReMo

SUMMARY

In short form, it went like this…

• Good turnout, standing room only for the presentations
• The topics we chose were spot on, lots of interest and questions
• Dev tools demos wowed. Thanks Matjaz for helping me get them set up
• Nice conversations after
• We didn’t recruit anyone new for mozilla.si or ReMo, but maybe a seed was planted that will grow later

RANDOM COVERAGE

If I missed anything here, let me know. I’ll update this post once I dig up some pictures. The video of the talks will pop up on Kiberpipa Video soon.

Tweets

• We tried with “first 5 RTs get a T-shirt at the event”
• This tweet alone generated 19 RTs: https://twitter.com/#!/mathjazz/status/118320392275374080
• https://twitter.com/#!/alesrosina/status/119101494711697410
• https://twitter.com/#!/wwwh/status/119103552344961024
• https://twitter.com/#!/skrat/status/119097755984601088
• https://twitter.com/#!/friedcell/status/119097123055747072
• https://twitter.com/#!/wwwh/status/119101800371585026
• https://twitter.com/#!/connectslo/status/118771581983014912
• https://twitter.com/#!/alesrosina/status/119104063274094592
• https://twitter.com/#!/wwwh/status/119110863176212481
• https://twitter.com/#!/brianking/status/119786869159510021
• https://twitter.com/#!/brianking/status/119170118180806656

Blog Posts

• http://mozilla.si/2011/09/21/ze-spet-novi-firefox/
• http://www.zemanta.com/blog/firefox-party/
• http://wwwh.si/spletne-urice-180-firefox-7-release-party-at-zemanta/
• http://www.kiberpipa.org/sl/event/180-firefox-7-release-party-zemanta-1429/

Related articles

• Mozilla Firefox 7 Comes with Memory Handling Improvements (news.dice.com)

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).

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, with pending micropayments from card. This was not good, since the card 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.

The rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Seven things:

1. My full name is Brian William Michael King. William is my grandfather’s name (my Dad’s Dad), and Michael is my Dad’s name (better known as Mick). I never met my grandfather, he died before I was born, but I am told I look quite like him. If I have a son I will call him Sue.
2. When I was younger I was a sports freak. I played a lot, including but not only – Gaelic Football, Hurling, Basketball, Soccer, Tennis and Rugby. When not playing, I watched almost any sport you can think of on the telly, from snooker to golf to darts. I gave up playing pretty much cold turkey when I was 16. Nowadays I watch no sport, with the exception of a bit of soccer here or there in major championships or when the Irish national team is playing.
3. I have Type 1 Diabetes, aka Diabetes mellitus, aka that particular genetic dice rolled my way. I am insulin dependent. I was diagnosed at age 31 which is quite late, Type 1 diabetes is also know as juvenile diabetes. My sister Paula was diagnosed when she was 7. I thought I escaped, but alas.
4. I was a vegetarian for 8 years. Nothing unusual there. I went back to eating meat when I got diabetes, as I lost a lot of weight at the time and it was too hard to balance the diet with my other medical needs. I’m fighting fit these days and am considering a vegetarian diet again.
5. When I was 18, I won a US green card in a lottery. During my college years and a couple of years after, I spent nearly all of my holidays in the US to keep it valid. I have lived in Connecticut (one of my sisters lives there), Boston (MA), Phoenix (AZ), and Boulder (CO) as well as visiting a bunch of other states. Eventually my visits became less frequent when I decided I wanted to stick it out in good ol’ Europe, and the green card lapsed. Later I lived in Vancouver, Canada, for a year on a work contract.
6. I came late to computers, probably because of #2. I was never into computer games growing up, and my first real exposure was typing up essays in college. My first Bachelors degree was in Politics and History at UCD, and after a year break I went back and did something completely different. I did a Higher Diploma in IT at NUI Maynooth. Luckily it was a good match and it thrust me into my future career.
7. I love dogs, but never had one growing up. Now I have an adopted “son”, Dolus, a graceful Black Labrador who is going on in years but remains a great pal.

7 people I tag:

1. David Boswell – because it is not as if he has enough to do already.
2. Sheppy – because he was not feeling the meme love.
3. David Rolnitzky – because choffman told me to, and because David is fun and smart.
4. Matthew Zeier – because he is a good Dad.
5. Jure Cuhalev – because he likes to blog, and he can spruce up his post with Zemanta.
6. Matthew Gertner – because he speaks many languages.
7. Doug Warner – because of the wonderful things he does.

While technologies are more prominent than ever, still today the benefits are still largely misunderstood by a large section of the business community. So if you need help in marketing your OSS project, or know someone who does, I’d recommend Sandro Groganz who is setting up a consultancy in this field.

Read all about it!

I’ve known Sandro for a few years,. He has a proven track record, and regularly writes on his blog and wiki about this topic.

Blogger’s Block #3: Dreaming in Browser Swamp

Some real gems in there:

It turns out if you dig deep into Mozilla (aka Netscape, aka Firefox, aka SeaMonkey, aka SwampMonster, I mean the thing really has way too many farging names already), you’ll find that it actually is a relatively full-featured platform. It’s not quite as general-purpose as an OS (or Java), but it’s certainly big and hairy enough to be making threats in that general direction.

We hear you brother, but wait…

…my God, it’s sooooooo ugly. It’s got well over a decade of ugly packed in there. “Hello, World” in Mozilla is six or seven files in as many different languages. I kid you not. It’s worse than Hello, World was back in the Petzold days of Win32 programming. You have your XUL file and your JavaScript file and your CSS file and your manifest.rdf and your i18n.something and I can’t remember what all else. And then you have to build them together (using some other files) to make even more files: a JAR file and an XPI file at a minimum. That’s one gnarly-ass introductory program.

Yes, we feel your pain. It’s a bit unfair to compare a Hello World extension to printing on the console in Python. Try building Hello World in QT or GTK and packaging it up into something usable. It’s a good point though. In the age of Web Applications, all that work seems laborious for the developer compared with uploading a PHP script. And end users are getting used to not installing anything any more.

There is always a bright side however. On JavaScript:

For one thing, despite JavaScript’s inevitable quirks and flaws and warts and hairy boogers and severe body odor, it possesses that magical property that you can get stuff done really fast with it. Well, if you can find any halfway decent tools and libraries for it, that is. Which you can’t, not without effort.

And so on it goes, taking digs at other technologies and how things are less than ideal in the browser programming world. Regardless, Mozilla and Firefox did breathe new life into the Web programming that really set the scene for the quest to make things nicer for all of us.

Hype comes and goes. Bubbles fill up and burst. In the end, the cream of the crop will rise to the top. Any other cliches anyone?

1. I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0. There are been many scare stories out and about of it being buggy and not ready for release yet, but I took the plunge and it appears to work great. I like the Admin panel changes and the new post WYSIWYG editor based on TinyMCE.
2. I’ve changed themes to use the fantastic Squible theme [more at the Squible flickr group]. This theme is really a breath of fresh air, bring a clean look, integrated tagging and tag searching, flickr integration and much much more.
3. I’ve changed the permalink structure. With mod_rewrite available on my host box, I’ve updated it from (for example):
   http://brian.kingsonline.net/talk/index.php/archives/132
   to
   http://brian.kingsonline.net/talk/archives/132
   This means many broken links all over the place and possible syndication chaos for a bit, but is better in the long term.
4. My feed has been consolidated into a single one (RSS) via feedburner. I’m not sure if this is a good idea because it decreases user choice, but I’ll see how it goes. I’d urge anyone already subscribed to resubscribe using this feed. If your software does auto-discovery, it should be found.

I don’t need to say much more, because others have. David has put togther a list of all the posts about the evening, with links to photos as well. Go, go, go…

More details:
http://www.siblogs.com/meet2006/

Don’t forget to drop an email to the address on that page if you are attending.

More on the podcast…

I haven’t listened to it yet, but intend to soon as it looks like there are some interesting topics on current features in WordPress, upcoming ones, and blogging in general. And Matt likes Irish accents, apparently!

There I am all alone in Dolenjska in the east. This fine interactive map was put together by David Vidmar at Si.blogs. Go check it out. Just close the bubble on top to reveal the map underneath, and click on the markers to find out more. Thanks to Marjana for helping me find the right spot on the map, otherwise my bad geography would have put me on the wrong side of the Gorjanci mountains.

So now that you know where I am, no stalking please. Or if you have to, just keep a safe distance and use binoculars. Thanks.

So if it looks like I am having a particularly prolific day of posting, well it is not the case! Er, sorry.

I worked at ActiveState back in 2000/2001. This was a hot time when the dot com bubble had yet to burst, and we thought we were changing the world working on great tools for open source languages. Of course, everything is not always what it seems, but it was still a fun time. I had the chance to work with folks who were not only smart, but great people too. Not least, there was Eric Promislow, David Ascher, and Shane Caraveo.

Shane is the Komodo lead, and has made his OSCON talk on Firefox Extensions available.