• A six month report from Translate.org.za

    November 24th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with Comments Off

    You may remember that Mozilla made a grant to the team at Translate.org.za this past summer to help improve the translation tools that many of our localizers use to localize Firefox.  One of the stipulations of that grant asked Translate to provide a mid-year report summarizing their progress.  Many thanks to Friedel (the lead developer at the Translate Toolkit) who submitted it to me today.

    Highlights include the following:

    • Integrating with Mozilla’s code repository system, Mercurial
    • Launching their offline editor Virtaal, which will allow localizers to work on translations when they are unable to access the Web
    • Merging Verbatim work by clouserw and dschafer into their trunk.  (Wil wrote a very thoughtful piece about the decisions Wil and Mozilla made before choosing to hack on Pootle and how it has gone since then.)
    • Migrating to Django, a new web platform for Pootle that should make developer contributions in the future a bit easier

    We hope to have two projects integrated into Verbatim by the end of this quarter so localizers can use the tool to translate the UI for both AMO (addons.mozilla.org) and SUMO (support.mozilla.com).  This will happen due to the great work by Wil Clouser and the guys at Translate Toolkit.

  • My script from today’s SUMO screencast

    June 20th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with Comments Off

    Here’s a summary of the script I created for Support Day live screencast.  Thought I would pass it along to see how I prepared for it and then give everyone the notes for some cool tips in Firefox 3.

    —————————

    We started by taking people through how to create another profile in Firefox, in case you have multiple users or want to test something or just want to have multiple profiles for something like home and work use.  Here is a nice SUMO article that shows how to do this.

    Profile management out of the way, I guided people through some keyboard shortcuts that I think power users either use all the time or could start using if they don’t already.  In this post, these are PC specific.

    • ctrl + K — takes a user directly to the search box in the upper right corner of the browser
    • ctrl + L — takes a user to the URL bar
    • alt + enter — opens the forthcoming results from the URL bar (or the search box) into a new background tab
    • ctrl + T — new tab
    • ctrl + shift + T –  “uncloses” a tab
    • ctrl + tab (shift) — takes user through tabs in the right direction; holding shift and ctrl + tab takes user left through all tabs
    • ctrl + 1 (or 2, 3, 4…) — takes user to first tab (or second, third, fourth…)
    • ctrl click — opens new background tab
    • ctrl shift click –  opens new foreground tab

    Here is a great SUMO article about keyboard shortcuts.

    A section I thought all power users should know well is the “Options” menu (or “Preferences” for Mac users).  You can get there by clicking on Tools –> Options. (Firefox –> Preferences for Mac)

    We looked at setting up multiple start pages in the “Main” section of the UI (just add a | after the URL shown in the Main section and type in your next URL.  At startup, you’ll have two pages load in tabs.

    And then Content –> Enable Javascript –> advance…  One example I gave was that every now and again I visit a site that automatically resizes my broswer when that site gets focus.  That’s annoying! Ever have that happen to you?  Well, go into the advanced settings above and uncheck “move or resize existing windows”.

    about:config

    Most of the presentation was spent discussing how to tweak various things in “about:config” in the browser.  One big caveat that Asa and I really tried to hammer home:  DON’T PLAY WITH ABOUT:CONFIG UNLESS YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT YOU’RE CHANGING.  There are lots of tips on the Web that tell you to go into About:Config and do this or that and then Firefox will make you your morning coffee.  Watch out for this snake oil.

    For some background on about:config, you can check out this Mozilllazine article: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entries

    At first, I just showed people how to get to about:config and then how to look through stuff and sort by different categories so a user can find what he or she wants.  We gave a quick preview on how to edit stuff and discussed the different between the default preferences and the bolded “user set” prefs.

    I then took the audience through a few features to tweak the Awesome bar so it does different things.  Many power users like the “old” URL bar of FF2 and before.  I pointed everyone to the “Oldbar” extension that presents the URL bar in the more traditional way.   Here is that oldbar add-on.

    Awesome bar power users can also change the number of results that appear when a user starts to key in familiar sites.  Here’s how you do that:

    • Enter about:config
    • Press the “I”ll be carefull. I promise!” button. (Because you will be.)
    • Enter browser.urlbar.maxRichResults in the Filter field to reach this preference.
    • Set it to your desired number of suggestions.

    Staying close to about:config, I then showed how to enable better color management, if you’re really into color images on the web…this is the trick for you.  (Forewarning, it may impact performance, so if that is a concern, then don’t enable this)

    • Enter gfx.color_management.enabled into the Filter field in about:config
    • set the boolean to true
    • if a user wants to explicity override the profile that the OS gives to Firefox, then you’ll have to enter “gfx.color_management.dipslay_profile” into the filter field and type that profile in the string
    • This extension also does all this for you…

    Finally, I tried to wrap up with some random tricks for users:

    And then, of course…the cool Easter Egg, about:robots.  Type about:robots into your URL and see what happens!

    Hope you enjoyed the demo.  Ping me with questions or suggestions.

    And, THANKS A MILLION TO Asa, Cww (irc nick), zxcc (irc), and Lucy for helping me with this. Couldn’t have done it without you.

  • Tips and Tricks for Power Users

    June 20th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with Comments Off

    In about 15 minutes (1:15 PM Pacific Time UTC- 7), Asa and I will be hosting a live session on Firefox 3 tips and tricks for power users.

    It is all part of the Support Day, that has been going on all day.

    You can tune into the broadcast here:  http://www.mogulus.com/sfd

    Tune in…let me know how I do.  We’re hoping that it will be somewhat casual and like a variety radio show…but Asa and I have been gathering a bunch of cool tips all morning to show you

  • More on the Screencast Contest

    June 6th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 1 comment »

    We are in the third week of the Screencast Contest, which has gotten a good number of submissions, but could certainly use some more.  Early next week, we’ll start our final push to get more videos submitted, and the contest will close on June 15th.  If you haven’t submitted a screencast yet, please go visit the contest home page, pick an article, and submit your entry.

    In addition to shining a bit more light on the contest, I thought I would also take this opportunity to explain a bit about why I got involved and what went into it.

    I met up with David Tenser at FOSDEM in February and asked him what we could do to empower more community members to contribute to SUMO.  Our idea was pretty straight forward and focused: to empower community members to help build a more robust knowledge base for Firefox Support.

    One way to make that knowledge base more helpful for end-users was to create screencasts for the most often reviewed articles.  And so, the Screencast contest was created.

    We had a lot of options to consider when we first dreamed up this idea.  Would we host the video?  What software could everyone use to film?  How do we choose the articles for the contest?  David had thought a lot about this and had most of these qustions answered.   We wouldn’t host videos, but encouraged participants to use Jing Software to do the screencasts.  David also had a way of isolating the top 100 most frequently visited articles.

    But, how would we promote it?  Would we create something like Operation Firefox that had a separately-branded microsite?  Or, would we use existing tools like Spread Firefox to showcase the contest.  We chose the latter for a few reasons:

    • Leverage:  (there’s that word again…)  We didn’t have any external costs related to a third-party design firm.  Also, we were able to get front-page placement on Spread Firefox for the first week of the contest.
    • Timing:  We could move pretty swiftly since the Spread Firefox platform was built to help do projects like this.
    • Ease:  With all the effort our community has put into creating SFx, it was clearly easiest for us to use the tool that’s been designed for something like this.

    I created the contest rules with Catherine Brady (one of Mozilla’s legal gurus) and wrote a lot of the content you see on the contest pages.  David chose all the articles that are featured in the contest and wrote a lot of the content for the site as well.  Finally, Tara came in and designed some really great art for us to use.

    This was one of the more efficient and tightly run projects I’ve worked on.  We met each week for about three weeks and just kept knocking off tasks left and right.  I had the benefit of helping to guide the Operation Firefox campaign, so I lifted a lot from that experience.  Many thanks to David and Tara for working so hard with me to launch this thing.

    Finally, a huge thanks to the community.  From your hard work, the SUMO knowledge base will have *hopefully* 100 great screencasts for more than 150 million users to access if they are having trouble with Firefox.  Very nice.

  • “Replaneting” some blog posts

    May 28th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with Comments Off

    I hope you don’t mind for just verbing the word “planet”…

    but, I forgot to tag my last three blog posts so that they showed up on planet.  I think the new Word Press interface overwhelmed me, leaving me a bit clumsy.

    Here are the links with quick descriptions:

    I’ll spend the rest of the afternoon learning the ins-and-outs of the interface.  (It’s not that hard, Seth, comeon!!)

« Older Entries