Entries Tagged 'Webgeeking' ↓

Following up on my previous post about the Christchurch Digital NZ hackfest, I did find the bug in my search plugin script, it was just one of those minor typos that takes ages to find because the error message you got when you tried to use it was completely uninformative. Sigh. However, since I spent most of my time on this during “Mozilla Service Week” I chalked up a few hours there to add to their total. Kudos to Mozilla for organising that and I’ll be sure to take part in a more serious way should they do it again.

Digital NZ has created a Custom Search Builder, and it seems to me that they could add Search Plugin generation to this reasonably easily. All they need to do is take a copy of my sample and use it to create a template the swaps out the content of the ShortName and Description tag, and also the template attribute in the <url> tag – everything else can stay the same. Then they need to add a javascript install link to the search result pages similar to the one here.

Heres what my sample search plugin file looks like (NB: First bit of code I can recall posting in this blog. I promise not to make it a habit.)


<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Digital NZ</ShortName>
<Description>Digital NZ Archive Search</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16" type="image/x-icon">data:image/x-icon;base64,[data string goes here]</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="get" template="http://search.digitalnz.org/en/search">
<Param name="search_text" value="{searchTerms}"/>
</Url>
</OpenSearchDescription>


The Webserver has to serve up that XML file with a MIME type of application/opensearchdescription+xml

eg using apache, in a directory where .xml isn’t reserved for anything else, one could put this in a .htaccess file:

AddType application/opensearchdescription+xml .xml

It’s also relatively trivial to add something to the headers of a webpage to enable autodiscovery of one or more search plugins. I’ve done that on my example page. Once you’ve done so it’ll appear in the search plugin manager for the browser, like this:

For more details, and how to do other cool things like enabling search completion, see:

OpenSearch Specification
Mozilla article on creating OpenSearch Plugins for Firefox

Fellow Kiwifoo camper Jo Eaton was in town on the weekend, spreading the good word about their mission to index all New Zealand’s digital content, and make the data available via their new developer API’s, with a travelling “Hackfest”. Fortunately It wasn’t too far for me to walk to take part – it was upstairs at CII, where Interclue is located.

Among the various hacks there was an iPhone app and a Drupal module, and I got most of the way through building a Search Plugin for Firefox and IE, which is a relatively trivial hack in theory but I’d never built one before so it was a useful learning experience.

Unlike fully blown browser extensions such as Interclue or Lazarus, search plugins are just an xml file that when loaded using a special javascript method (only available in certain browsers, such as Firefox 2+ and IE7+) will cause your browser to create another search provider for the search box, which by default in Firefox only has a few general purpose search engines such as Google and Yahoo available, and a few site specific ones such as Wikipedia. But anyone can create a new search plugin for the search on their website, and getting users to install it can mean that they come back to your website more often.

I found a few little niggles, such as that the xml file had to be served up with the right MIME type by the webserver, and that the best way to provide the icon was using a “Data URI” – essentially a way of encoding an image using text. Fortunately Hixie has a kitchen for that.

My attempt is here, and in theory it should install fine in IE7+ and Firefox2+ by clicking the link on this page, but so far, it doesn’t, and I’m not quite sure why. I’ll update this post once I’ve fixed it! [update: fixed]

DigitalNZ has a “roll your own search engine” system set up for their growing collection of Digital Kiwiana, and it should be simple enough to extend that system to build a search plugin for each derived engine, since they will share the same pattern apart from the target URLs. There are also standards for search completion (guessing what you want to search for) and autodiscovery. I’ll make another post in a couple of days once I’ve had a chance to figure it out properly.

[updated because I forgot their mission was only to index the metadata, the digitizing and putting online bit is up to the contributors and partner organizations]

As I mentioned, Lazarus is now a Mozilla recommended add-on. That seemed to be good for about 3,000 downloads a day last month. But on Sunday night I glanced at our stats and noticed we’d had 10,000 downloads. Gosh.

Provisionally, I am inclined to blame this tweet, which eventuated shortly after this post. Cheers Fred. :-)

I expected the download rate to tail off after that. However, it’s actually steadily increasing, thanks to a spate of retweets and blog posts from people like Rick Broida, who is syndicated all over the place. We might clock over 100,000 installs for the week at this rate. That would put Lazarus in the the top 20 Firefox addons, maybe even top 10. Unfortunately I can’t tell right now because the AMO stats are broken – the last 5 days of traffic haven’t been processed for some reason. So everyone’s weekly numbers are currently way off. That may be fixed by the time you read this post, of course.

A few weeks ago I was talking to my advisors about whether we should be focused on Lazarus or Interclue. I argued that Interclue had better long term monetization prospects, and showed them my marvelous J-curves. Nat pointed out that Lazarus had the more obvious value proposition and some incredible user feedback. I threw a few ideas into the ring on how we could extend and monetize Lazarus, and it was mooted that it would be best to get at least one of those ideas into action before we started to actively promote it. However, it appears that active promotion wasn’t exactly required in this case. We appear to have entered a cycle where every time someone complains in a tweet, on a forum, or in their blog that they just lost a pile of text they typed in, someone else chimes in and says “Got Firefox? Get Lazarus.” or words to that effect. Hence we have some pretty impressive word of mouse going on right now.

[UPDATE: It appears there was a bit of a stats glitch! We were never getting more than ~5k installs / day for Lazarus. However, ~5k/day is still very impressive and a considerable boost over what we were getting before that]

Some good news. Lazarus Form Recovery, our little side project, has risen through the ranks and joined Interclue on the AMO “recommended list” – probably the highest accolade available in the world of browser add-ons, apart from perhaps a glowing review in the Mossberg column, as our colleagues at Surf Canyon recently achieved.

The AMO directory (addons.mozilla.org) is linked directly from the Firefox Tools|Add-ons menu, and add-ons from the recommended list are even featured within the browser itself, so the 30-40 add-ons on that list do get a lot of exposure, and having two in there at once really is a great honor, given how many they have to choose from.

I’ve been asked a few times how we managed it. The short version is in both cases I wrote to Mozilla and explained how our addon met their criteria for recommendation, which you can read at the bottom of this page, and not long after that they were recommended. So it’s really about having the right sort of add-on and the right sort of reviews, rather than doing much in the way of lobbying or cajoling.

Most of the credit goes to Karl, who put a lot of effort into making Lazarus almost flawless. My only significant contributions were the original concept, a few innovative implementation ideas (eg asymmetric encryption to get around having to enter a password), and letting him avoid our Interclue todo list for a month or three. It took a while longer to get Lazarus right than we expected, there are a bunch of edge cases where form recovery is hard, but we felt it was worth chasing them all down so we could honestly say “Never lose anything you type into a web form again”.

Part of the Interclue Manifesto says “We will never stop looking for more ways to increase the value of the time people spend online.”, and certainly being able to recover hours of typing that otherwise would have been lost has increased the value of my time online, and from the ecstatic reactions we’ve gotten from Lazarus users, I’d say we haven’t strayed too far from our core mission.

Here are some snippets from Lazarus reviews on AMO:

I guess that means they like it :-)

It’s also gotten good feedback from tech bloggers who picked up on it. Not a lot of mainstream attention so far, probably because I haven’t contacted any of them, but hopefully that will come with time. Hey Walt, about that column of yours….

Ada Lovelace was the world’s first programmer, writing code for a machine that never got finished, the Babbage differential engine. She died far too early at the tender age of 36 – the same age as her Father, Lord Byron. Today is her day, and to celebrate it over 1500 bloggers, including this one, pledged to blog about one of our Tech Heroines on this date[1].

I’ve found it really hard to pick only one Tech Heroine. I know so many of them. But you’re supposed to just pick one for Ada Lovelace Day so I’ll do a follow up post later mentioning several other Tech Heroines I could have written about (and might write about for #ALD10!) Several of my tech Heroines I know personally, but I think for today I’ll play it safe and talk about someone I’ve never met but have always admired: Gina Trapani. As a promoter of how software and technology can improve our lives, she is a first class Technoprogressive, and worthy of great thanks and praise.

Many of you will know her as the founding editor of the uber-famous (well, in tech circles) Lifehacker, a phenomenally successful blog covering tips, tricks, software and sites that offer a multitude of ways to improve your workflow and lifestyle. Sadly, the sheer number of suggestions forced me to stop reading Lifehacker a while ago – chasing up all those potential speed improvements wasn’t helping me get anything done in the short term! I’m looking forward to achieving a somewhat more measured pace of life improvement from reading Gina’s new blog; Smarterware.

The fact that so many of these posts were of good value, and the fact that Gina was churning out a dozen or more every day, day after day after day, is certainly a Heroic feat in my opinion. I don’t think I’ve managed a dozen blog posts inside a single month, let alone in a single day.

While researching Gina’s life (a remarkably easy task, given how much she has written or had written about her in the last decade), I discovered an article that mentioned the genesis of Lifehacker – it turns out she was already working for Nick Denton as a coder when he bought the domain name, and her enthusiasm for the what could be done with it made him offer her the editor job on the spot. Many will realize this was probably one of the best HR decisions Nick made in his life, and it has to be said he’s made some good ones in his time.

“The one blogger I wished we had landed at Weblogs, Inc. was Gina Trapani from LifeHacker. I tried every two months for a year I think… no offer was good enough. Very, very frustrating.” – Jason Calacanis

To go from being a full time professional coder (with a pretty impressive resume) to being a full time professional writer is no small feat. Both involve using a keyboard and your brain – after that the similarities start to die off pretty fast. So that’s another reason Gina is a Tech Heroine.

I was actually aware of Gina well before she started Lifehacker, in that she was one of the few girl geeks who was seriously blogging, and there was a time (pre-2004) when just running your own blog qualified you as being moderately cool. I looked in the WayBackMachine and discovered she’s been blogging since late 2001 – which makes her a serious early adopter. Here’s her first post.

Another reason she’s among my Tech Heroines is that she’s the author of quite a few Firefox Addons, and I would say she’s contributed just as much to the success of Firefox through constantly blogging about Firefox and Firefox add-ons on Lifehacker, and providing early examples of add-ons for people to learn from, as almost anyone who actually works for the Mozilla Foundation. They should give her a medal or something. One of the earliest “Top X Firefox Add-ons” lists features her app “About this site”.

For reasons that may not be immediately apparent, the success of Mozilla ranks up there with the success of Google, Wikipedia, and the W3C as reasons why the web is so damned useful today, as opposed to mired in a morass of crappy over-commercialized portal sites and walled gardens, so Gina’s contributions to the success of Firefox are no small thing in the world of Tech Heroism.

Gina has said that her book is one of the things she’s most proud of, so I really must get around to buying it sometime soon. [2] Her book is called “Lifehacker – 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Life”.

If you can’t wait to get the book, or don’t feel like perusing thousands of lifehacker articles for your dose of wisdom from Gina, the interviews she gave to Tim Ferris and The New York Times should at least whet your appetite.

It’s not for nothing that in 2007 she was ranked 7th by Forbes in a list of 25 Web Celebrities, one above Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook.

Herein endith my tribute to Gina Trapani. To read about more Tech Heroines on Ada Lovelace Day, check out this huge list of posts, which is also available referenced by subject, and the locations of the bloggers writing about them!

[1] “Today” being a somewhat amophorus concept for me. Lets just stay I started this post on the 24th, NZ time, and will finish on the 24th, American time.

[2] My book reading has slowed to a crawl now the internet feeds me pretty much everything I need, but I make exceptions. It doesn’t help that book prices in New Zealand are at least twice what they are in the USA, if we’re lucky. This is another reason the internet is a great leveller – eliminating the edge once enjoyed by readers in large markets with better enconomies of scale. Imagine what it would be like if everything on the internet was priced differentially by where you lived, or you weren’t allowed to watch clips from an upcoming movie because it wasn’t available in your country….ok, bad example. Eventually the creative industries will realise how batshit crazy they are to do this to their international fans.