Rooftop lab

Want to help the Mozilla project? Here’s something anyone with a web browser can help with.

A lot of technical documents still live on www.mozilla.org. This is bad for a lot of reasons, but fundamentally it’s just the wrong place for them. developer.mozilla.org is their proper home. The pages will be much easier for us all to find, improve, and maintain there.

You can help migrate this content.

• Find a page to migrate. MDC:Existing Content is the nerve center of this operation and contains a huge list. (Seasoned hackers might prefer to grab the source code for the entire www.mozilla.org web site from CVS and use their best judgment about what to migrate. Some things are clearly technical docs; some aren’t.)
• View → Page Source. Copy the HTML code for the page.
• Paste it into an HTML to Wiki converter. (Unfortunately, this one has a few bugs. Watch for glitches with non-ASCII characters like  . It also converts + signs to spaces. Quaint bug, very 1995. If you know of a better converter that requires no download, let me know.)
• Make a new page on developer.mozilla.org. The easiest way is to edit MDC:Existing Content, find the link that you’re about to migrate, and add: - now migrating to [[Title of the new page you want to make]]. Click Save Page. Now MDC:Existing Content should have a red link (you just added it). Click the link to go to the new, empty page, then click “edit this page”.
• Paste in the Wiki code. In the Summary field, write “migrated from ” and paste in the URL of the old www.mozilla.org page. Click “Save Page”.
• Look at the new page. If it looks awful in any way, click the “Edit” link on the right-hand side and clean it up. (the “Editing help” link might help you figure out what’s wrong).
• Follow the 5 After Document Migration steps to make sure (a) people can find your new page; and (b) nobody else does the same work all over again.

See? Easy and fun. This is what I do now when something’s building. So far I’ve migrated 23 pages.

If you really want a new best friend, write an extension to make this process less ridiculous.