Archive for the ‘News’ Category

A recent Lifehacker article on the Top 10 Tools to Get Blogging Done featured my oh-so-handy CoLT extension. Unfortunately the article linked to the old URL, for which I failed to provide a redirect. This problem is now fixed, and the broken URL now redirects to the new location.

You’ve got to tell me about this kind of stuff people!

I have made several changes to the Toolbar Tutorial to support the upcoming Firefox 3.0. Here’s a rundown of what has changed:

• The downloadable files in chapter 1 have been updated to support Firefox 3.0.
• All maxVersion references in chapter 2 have been bumped to 3.0.*.
• All preventBubble references have been changed to stopPropagation, since the preventBubble call has been deprecated.
• I have unified formatting across the various chapters, to be more consistent.

As always, please let me know if you spot an error.

Over the past month or so, I have received a few emails asking about how to make donations to Born Geek. Well, donations are now possible through the good folks at PayPal. If you would like to support my development efforts, head on over to our new donation page.

Though it goes without saying, I really appreciate all the kind emails I get about the tutorials and software I offer. It’s good to know that my work is helping folks all around the world.

I have (mostly) completed the conversion of this site from Movable Type to WordPress 2.5. As always, there will be plenty of tweaking over the next few days. If you find anything out of the ordinary, please leave a comment on this post, or contact me directly. I’ve done my best to prevent broken links on the site, but there’s always a chance I missed something.

Moving Born Geek to WordPress offers several benefits:

• Articles and posts are easier to update.
• Static content and news postings no longer need to be separated into multiple “blogs.”
• Comment spam is much easier to manage (and prevent).
• The administration interface is much nicer.

I have yet to turn on any WordPress caching, so please excuse any slow performance for the next few days. The WP-Cache plugin apparently has a few issues with WordPress 2.5, and I haven’t yet investigated the alternate WP Super Cache plugin.

A brand new build of Googlebar Lite is now available. Changes in this release include:

• Firefox 3.0pre support
• Several bug fixes
• A new Czech (cs-CZ) translation
• And other minor improvements

Please note that the minVersion has been bumped to 2.0, meaning that 1.0.x and 1.5.0.x versions of Firefox are no longer supported. This change is unavoidable, since several changes in preparation for Firefox 3.0 utilize features not available prior to Firefox 2. The previous release (4.6.4) will remain available for any users who still browse with 1.0.x or 1.5.0.x.

Version 2.4.0 of CoLT is now available. This latest release adds a new rich-text copy format, Firefox 3.0pre support, a new Polish (pl-PL) translation, and a new Persian (fa-IR) translation. Also, please note that the minVersion for this release has been bumped to 1.5, meaning that 1.0.x builds of Firefox are no longer supported. The previous release (2.3.0) will continue to be available for any straggling 1.0.x users.

It seems that the Googlebar Lite build script that I updated in Chapter 7 of the Firefox Toolbar Tutorial had a number of bugs. They have all been squashed, and the script has been updated yet again. At some point, I will rewrite the script from scratch and make it much more portable. In addition to the updated build script example, I have corrected a few typos regarding the automated packaging process (also in chapter 7).

I have made a few updates to Chapter 7 in the Firefox Toolbar Tutorial at this site. Several typos have been corrected, and I have posted a brand new version of my Googlebar Lite build script, which I recently rewrote. The new script now uses the standard Unix zip tool (instead of WinZip), it automatically updates the chrome manifest for me, and it has generally been simplified.

I have finished preparing both CoLT and Googlebar Lite for Firefox 3. Since the official add-ons website is not accepting extensions with a maxVersion of 3.0.*, and in the interest of trying to reduce the number of releases I have to make, I’m going to wait and release these updates when Firefox 3 beta 5 is officially released. The official release shouldn’t be too much longer from now, seeing as the source tree has already been frozen in anticipation for a new beta build.

Stay tuned for further updates. I’m really excited about Firefox 3 … I hope you are too!

Yesterday, I made a few updates to the Firefox Profile Tutorial here at this website. It turns out that the -P command line option is case-sensitive (as it should be). Firefox 2 apparently doesn’t care about case, but the new Firefox 3 builds do.

All of the official documentation I read also mentions the -ProfileManager command line option. I’m not certain if Firefox 3 wants the camel-case, but I’ve updated the tutorial to reflect this information. Let me know if you see any other errors in the tutorial.