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.

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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:

• Shrink the super-sized back button by going to View –> Toolbars –> Customize… (click on use small icons)
• Caret browsing by hitting F7 on a PC or going to Preferences –> Advanced –> Use cursor keys to navigate in a page
• Full-page zoom in/out.  I wrote a post about this a few days back…one of my favorite features.
• How to delete mistyped URLs in the Awesome Bar
• Operating in Safe Mode.

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.

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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

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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.

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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:

• A post from May 12 about the Screencast Contest…please read it!  I talk a bit about why I think this contest is important…
  
• A post from May 21 showing a few localization video demos from Translate.org.za… You might have seen this because Brian King blogged about it here.
  
• My day yesterday (May 27) at the Net Squared conference. You may have seen this one because I re-planeted it today.

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

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Before I go further though, here’s a bit of why I got involved.  This quarter, I decided to work more closely with David and the support team to help build the SUMO community.  Three weeks ago, I blogged about my experience with Mozilla Live Chat! and why I thought it was an important experience for me to have tried as a Mozilla contributor.  Live support is such a great way to help end-users, and highly educational, but it is likely that it will have some challenges of scale.  Nevertheless, that was one effort by me to become more involved and I’ll keep participating when I can.

Another project I’ve committed to working on is the contest.  David and I came up with the idea to host a contest where anyone could create a screencast that visually demonstrates the instructions that are spelled out in any one of the top 100 support articles in the SUMO knowledge base.  Our thinking was that if we could get people excited to help produce cool, short screencasts that illustrated various support topics, not only would it lead to some great content for the SUMO site, but also to ongoing contributions from interested volunteers.  We’ll see if we are proven right or wrong, but David and I have high hopes.

One reason I find this one so important is that a good screencast can serve as the unique user experience that bridges a well written how-to article together with live support.  With a set of great screencasts, a user not only will read the accompanying article that might solve the issue they are having, but also he or she will see exactly how to perform the fix to the problem.  Without being able to provide live support to every single end-user (we have north of 150 million of users these days!), screencasts are a leveraged solution that come pretty close to live support.  I know I have benefited from live help with other technologies, but also have found that a great screencast can be even more helpful.  I can go back and watch it again, pause the video, and share it with others.

So, if you have time and interest, please participate!!  We have great prizes:

• a unique run of t-shirts for those people who submit the best screencast for each of the 100 articles (yes, that could be as many as 100 winners if we get enough screencasts submitted!)
• and, a grand prize for the best overall video…ok we’re still keeping it a secret, but you can use it to record stuff and then play that stuff back…

Looking forward to receiving your entry!

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Most of my day was spent doing Mozilla Live Chat! support.  After a few training sessions where I observed a member from our SUMO community doing live chat, I was cleared to take support requests from end-users.  I was struck by the importance of this experience — interacting with our users, answering what might be considered simple questions from within the walls of Mozilla, and learning a lot about our product.  My experience also begged the question, “Is the end-user part of the Mozilla Community?”.  Some may claim that the question is not really something to debate.  Of course, the end-user is part of the community, right?  Or, is our community simply the world of volunteers who help make our product ready for end-user?  You be the judge:  I learned from them just as I learned from those who help localize our software or help others write extensions.  And, I found myself asking, “How easy is our software to use and how well is our software designed for user interaction?”.

Here is an excerpt from a support session, in case you’d like to read about just how one went.  I’ve changed the end-user identity and edited out some parts to keep it short:

Friday, April 11, 2008

(12:43 PM) sethb: hi end-user51
(12:43 PM) end-user51: Hi.  Can you help?
(12:43 PM) sethb: so you cannot view your adobe documents with your browser?
(12:45 PM) end-user51: No.  The message reads”Cannot use reader to view document in your browser.  now closing.
(12:46 PM) sethb: let me do some research on your issue. i’ll be back in a second.  ok?
(12:47 PM) end-user51: ok.  Trying to get my proof of insurance so I can register my car.
(12:47 PM) sethb: ok…we’ll try to do this quickly.
(12:48 PM) end-user51: Thanks.  Work graveyard at a casino.  Had to stay up in order to do this.
(12:49 PM) sethb: ok.  what version of Adobe Reader are you using?
(12:49 PM) sethb: can you find that?
(12:49 PM) end-user51: Will check
(12:49 PM) end-user51: 7.0
(12:50 PM) sethb: ok
(12:50 PM) sethb: can you do one thing for me?  open a new tab in Firefox and paste (or type) about:plugins into the URL bar where you would type a webpage.
(12:50 PM) sethb: let me know when you’ve done that
(12:51 PM) end-user51: ok, got it
(12:51 PM) sethb: i am going to see if your Adboe Reader plugin is enabled.
(12:51 PM) end-user51: ok

I quickly found out from end-user51 that the plug-in was enabled.

(12:54 PM) sethb: is Adobe open?
(12:54 PM) sethb: try this:
(12:54 PM) sethb:    1.  In Adobe Reader, choose “Edit -> Preferences -> Internet”.
2. Deselect “Display PDF In Browser” and then click OK.
3. Choose “Edit -> Preferences -> Internet”
4. Select “Display PDF In Browser” and then click OK.
(12:55 PM) end-user51: sorry.  Got kicked off firefox.  Had to restart session.
(12:56 PM) sethb: no problem.
(12:56 PM) end-user51: ok. give me a minute.
(12:58 PM) end-user51: will retry my proof
(12:58 PM) sethb: ok.

The end-user followed this recommendation and responded:

(1:00 PM) end-user51: Yeah, it works!!  Thanks so much!!!!!!  Was stuck huh?
(1:00 PM) sethb: so now you can view your Adobe docs?
(1:00 PM) sethb: great.
(1:01 PM) sethb: if there’s nothing else, please go get some sleep and take care of me next time i visit the black jack tables.
(1:01 PM) end-user51: didn’t have to restart to get it to work.  Thanks again.  Good training excersize?
(1:01 PM) sethb: great exercise.  thanks.

A few remarks and observations about this conversation and my experience with Live Chat!:

1. “end-user51″ has a life!  Brilliant observation, I realize…  But, after reading that this person had been working the graveyard shift and had stayed awake to figure out this problem, I was somehow even more motivated to solve this quickly.   It took about 20 minutes for me to figure it out, but with more familiarity, I bet I could have answered this in under 10 minutes.
2. Why wouldn’t this person deserve anything less than a consistent, polite, and helpful experience from Mozilla?  That was my main objective.  If this person is coming to us for live support, there is a good chance that they are on the verge of frustration or even anger.  Maybe the person is even ready to ditch Mozilla for (gasp) “other browser”.  What a great time to recapture a user’s loyalty, no?
3. Is Live Chat! scalable?  To provide quick and superb support to end-users, it seems like we will need to have a big, reliable, and well-trained Live Chat! community.  Going forward, I will be dedicating a piece of my week to participate in Live Chat!, in hope to make it scalable.  Please join me.
4. Live Chat! is a great way to get your head out of the weeds and learn about how the product impacts the lives of end-users.  My guess is even the most gifted developers would learn how to make Firefox better if they participated.
5. Another shout-out to the community…  The articles that have been written to help end-users solve issues and the active members of the community who were online behind the scenes to help me help end-user51 were critical to my success.  Thanks to everyone!

I didn’t spend all day on Live Chat!.  My day ended by scanning five articles in the SUMO knowledge base and providing minor edits when necessary.  I competed the task, but again, I found that many articles were really well written and required only minor tweaks.  This is not to say that SUMO is in perfect condition – a lot of content still needs to be created.  But, what’s up is pretty darn good.  David Tenser (our fearless and ebullient SUMO leader) and I want to continue to build the SUMO community this quarter.  We’ll be trying creative ways to get more content on the site and to get more of you involved in the process.  Interested?  Then just ping me, please.

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So, in case you missed it (from the SUMO day blog post):

“This is a great opportunity for you to get involved with Mozilla, regardless of your interests or expertise. We need people to write articles, create screenshots, correct spelling and grammar, answer people’s questions in the forum, or interact directly with Firefox users in live chat — just to name a few of the many ways you could help us out.”

You can learn more here at the SUMO Day webpage (already linked to above).  I also found the contributor home page (passed to me by zzxc, thanks!) and this page created by SUMO community member, Bo Bayles, to be quite helpful as I prepare for the day.

It’s hard to gauge how much I can get done, but I thought I would try to do the following:

1. Add screenshots to an article
2. Participate in “Live Chat Support” (Learn more by following this link.)
3. Review and edit 5 articles by improving wording and checking spelling and grammar

That should occupy a good part of my morning on Friday, then I have to get an MRI done on my ankle, so I’ll have to head out.  I put my goals for SUMO day out there for everyone to read.  If you’d like, feel free to post yours here…or post elsewhere and link to it in the comments.

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