Last night, I started work on the first of my triad of extensions detailed in this earlier post, listarchive. So I can't come up with a good name. The most up-to-date information will be available at this web page, but I will summarize some key points here.

listarchive is an extension that first and foremost aims to provide sane access to mailing list archives as if they were a simple folder in Thunderbird (and probably Seamonkey as well). From a certain user request, it is likely I will touch on other aspects of mailing lists as well in this extension, e.g., the desired "Reply to List" feature. In addition, however, I will also be using my experience with developing this extension to write a guide to developing extensions involving more complex operations in Thunderbird.

The extension, however, is still very much in the design phases. I would very much welcome any feedback to be sent to Pidgeot18+listarchive@gmail.com (with the "+listarchive" component, it helps me triage replies). Specific pieces of information I am looking for at this point:

• Mailing list archive URIs; I ask in advance to not send any more mailman URIs (unless it happens to be in a different language than English), as I have several already. I am most interested in accumulating a diverse supply of mailing list implementations and international versions to best determine what impact internationalization plays on list archives.


• Ways in which you think a mailing list archive should tie into regular email. For example, I believe it should translate a mailing list URI reference (e.g., http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-May/014646.html) into a link to open the message up as a TB email message.


• Any questions or suggestions for UI (this comes more into play once I have some prototypes working).


• Any other question you may have (related to listarchive). I'm quite willing to answer them.

Thanks in advance for any comments you send me. I'm also hoping that this will work out well (no reason it shouldn't).

15 Websites / Services I’d Actually Pay For Ryan lists fifteen websites/online services he would be willing to pay for, if they were not free. Worthy of note is the following in the list: Wordpress.org: The benefit of blogging with WP is so significant (SEO, functionality, flexibility) that it’s well worth paying for. I’d probably pay a $200 for an installation… which makes me realize how much I rely on the product.

This is an incredibly interesting line of thought and I am sure a lot of Web 2.0 companies/services would kill to have more user data and input on this. I strongly believe that revenue models and monetization techniques are the stuff that make or break a company in spite of the fantastic idea/concept that it might provide. In that spirit, here is my list of 12 things online (15 things were hard to find quickly) I am willing to pay for.

• GMail: Without a doubt my one most used tools online. I returned to GMail a few years ago and cannot imagine my life without it. Add other services such as Google Reader and Google (outside of google search, without which I would be completely lost, at least for a few days) is indispensable to me.
• WordPress: I would pay for it undoubtably, but I think the allure would be gone if I had to pay. Whenever I think WordPress, I think GPL and Open Source and I just cannot imagine the two apart.
• Firefox: This was a tough one. I would pay for it, but look at #2. I would however, be willing to pay for the Web Developer Toolbar extension, the colorpicker extension and a few others that I use everyday.
• Akismet: I do pay for Akismet. The service has caught 3,263,951 spam on this blog since I first installed it.
• SlickDeals: I am an addict. If I had to pay to be a member, within reason, I would pay for it.
• StatCounter: Their free service is great, but if they started charging for their basic service, the switching cost of years of accumulated data would force me to pay.
• Techmeme: Nominal, yearly charges would be fine by me, especially if it removed those sponsored posts. I use it too often.
• Skype: Again, nominal yearly charges would be acceptable for the basic PC to PC calling. I already keep my account topped off for when I call international phones once in a while.
• Craigslist: If I had to pay a small fee for the listings, if the charge was only initiated for items that are sold (which I understand would be hard to monitor), I would pay for it. Craigslist is a much better place to buy and sell everyday used items than eBay and I have made better deals via Craigslist than any other online selling venue.
• Woopra: I am getting addicted to the Woopra fever. As I have expressed in the past to JohnP, Elie and others, I would be willing to pay a reasonable fee for it.
• Various WordPress Plugins: I have paid and have dontated to the developers of various WordPress plugins that I find extremely useful and which have become completely indispensable after I have installed them and used them. They include OIOPublisher, Ozh’s Who Sees Ads, Mark’s Subscribe to Comments etc.
• Feedburner: Now another Google service but Feedburner reduces the traffic load from feed readers and I would have paid for the service if it were not free.

What would you be willing to pay for? If famous OSS programs were not OSS, would you pay for them? Does the cost of software make it less or more attractive (not the relative cost, but just the fact that it is not free)? Would you pay for Twitter? How about Flickr or Google Analytics? What if TechCrunch went to a registration model? Would it still be as popular? How much do you spend on personal online services every month today? Are online vendors sharing more of your wallet today than say, two years ago? Do you think this trend will continue to increase?

These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night.

Aza Raskin (feed) - “My dream is to create a world where nobody says, “I’m bad at computers.” That’s the computer’s fault, not theirs. My major projects have been songza.com (music search engine), humanized.com (linguistic command line and lots of blogging on user experience), and bloxes.com (human-sized cardboard legos). I’ll be blogging on experience, design, programming, and shiny things.”

Tara Shahian (feed) - Joined Mozilla in January of 2008 and has been working with the product marketing team on a variety of projects surrounding the release of Firefox 3, and beyond. Prior to Mozilla she worked in a forensic and litigation consulting firm for 2 years after receiving my BA in Business Economics from UCLA. She also has a creative background and freelance in graphic design.

There are at least two distinct forms of web framework styles: "right-leaning" and "left-leaning" (in the political sense).

After hearing me crying for help, my friend Sirdarckcat went hunting and entrapped a poltergeist which haunts IE only.

Is it this the one Manuel Caballero was talking about?
Or was that a different cross-browser evilness?

However, I ain’t afraid of no ghosts :)

We have a litter of fox kits in the back field at our house.  Today we managed to catch them on film.  Please enjoy our very own foxkehs. 

You can view the whole set here:
http://flickr.com/photos/lauraxthomson/sets/72157605003262452/

Charles Stricklin, the host of WordCamp Dallas 2008 and The WordPress Podcast has released The Voices of WordCamp Dallas, a collection of quick interviews and questions I asked during the event.

I was so amazed at how open everyone was, willing to share their thoughts on WordPress, WordCamp, blogging, and the magic of the web today. I talked to bloggers who had been blogging for years and newbies, with only a few weeks under their belts. It was a collection of the whose who and whose upcoming in the blogosphere and thank you to Charles for sharing the magic that his efforts brought together in one place.

Some of the interviews are excerpted and I hope to bring them to you in their entirety soon, so stay tuned. In the 30 minute set of The Voices of WordCamp Dallas, you will hear:

00.10 Bill Sholar of Webfratelli
00.37 Dan Bates
00.59 Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today
01.45 Ptah Dunbar
02.34 Bryan Lee
03:14 Cory Miller of iThemes Media
03:44 Henry Pugsley
04:07 Kerry Webster of WEBsmith internet consultants
04:44 Wendi McGowan of Wendistry, LLC and Scott Ellis of vsellis.com
05:36 Dave Curlee and Katherine Curlee of RealCookN.tv
06:28 DB Ferguson of No Fact Zone
07:48 Alexander Frison of Not a Niche
09:18 Tony Cecala of Holistic Networker
10:04 Mike Borschow of MetroQ.com
11:55 Mark Ghosh of Weblog Tools Collection
12:30 Dorian Karthauser of DK Enterprises (beginner blogger)
17:35 Charlene Mullenweg (sister of Matt Mullenweg)
23:15 Jim Halloran of AlcoholismDiseaseFree.com
24:13 Ryan Joy and Michelle Greer of Volusion and Michelle’s Blog
26:41 Kathleen Ratliff
27:14 William Addington of Williamedia
28:31 Doug Smith of smithsrus.com and Hide a Pod
29:25 Ronald Huereca of Readers Appreciation Project and Weblog Tools Collection
30:23 Dimitri (blog not public - biotech)

I look forward to repeating this fascinating dialog in future WordCamps and blogging events I travel to and speak at. It’s a humbling experience as I come to teach and come away learning more than I ever expected. Thank you to all for sharing your thoughts and passions with me!

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

My usual response to "Can Drupal do X?" is "Drupal can do anything!"  Usually the tougher question is figuring out just how to do X in the sea of configuration options and modules available. 

Drupal’s site itself has a site recipes section (read carefully, some can be a bit out of date), and there are other such tutorials out there on the web (just add in a keyword for the kind of site you’re trying to build). Below are a few links to Drupal Recipes for several common website styles.

read more

Start: 2008-05-13 08:00 Timezone: Etc/GMT-8

Hi Everyone,

Just another friendly reminder to join us Tuesday in #bugday:

*Tuesday, 13. May 2008 :*

* Asia session - 14:00-16:00 (Beijing)

* Euro session - 14:00-16:00 (Berlin)

* Amer. session - 12:00-14:00 (Los Angeles)

See also the timetable on
http://quality.mozilla.org/events/bug-days#Schedule for your Timezone.

On Bugday on Tuesday, 13. May 2008, we will check unconfirmed Firefox Bugs, filed in the last 2 weeks.

Please use this Bug Query http://tinyurl.com/4geuwg and check this bugs if you can confirm them.

read more

I've just completed the 19th new skin of my campaign, mitchinson-golden, which can be seen on demo.mojoportal.com

One more to go and I'm finished with skinning for a while!

Joe Audette  ...

Do you think it is bad if your data is locked in to a single vendor? Do you think it is bad if you are locked in in using software owned by a single vendor? Do you think this is especially bad if the one using the software is the European Parliament? Don’t you think this is bad especially for a democratic institution?

If so, then please sign this petition which calls for using Open Standards, more competition and no vendor lock-in for the EU parliament! Read the full petition here and please sign it here!.

Please help to promote Open Standards and Interoperability!

(via ZEA Partners)
Technorati Tags: dataportability, openstandards, eu, parliament, petition

Promote the use of Plone organizing an introductory talk in your town and be part of the World Plone Day.

Aqua CMS Content Management System Launched April 2008!
ZDNet UK, UK - 8 hours ago
LTS Media Ltd, the London based Online Consultancy Firm, has launched its latest technology prodigy, AQUA Content Management System, on April 9th 2008. ...

LTS Media Ltd. - Internet Consultancy
ZDNet UK, UK - 8 hours ago
LTS Media Ltd, the London based Online Consultancy Firm, has launched its latest technology prodigy, AQUA Content Management System, on April 9th 2008. ...

I've just completed the 18th new skin for mojoPortal, far exceeding my original goal of 10 new skins. This one is named mitchinson-khaki, and the one below is styleshout-coolwater, which I completed yesterday. You can see these skins now on demo.mojoportal.com. I still have 2 more designs that I want to try and make skins with today while I have skinning momentum. Tomorrow I will package a new release of mojoPortal to include all these new skins. I've been working full blast on skins since April 23rd until today. I'm very happy with the results, but ready to get working on other priorities.

Joe Audette  ...

I’m testing out a new community tagging feature, you should see a form to add people tags on photo pages now. Try it out, particularly on the Milan/WordCamp galleries - day one and day two. Proposed tags go into a moderation queue, so they’ll show up after they’re approved.

Usually when I download files, I just click and forget.  Then, once every day or two, I look in my downloads folder to see what I have there, and poke through it to pull out the stuff I need to look at, to install apps, and so forth.

So really, it doesn’t matter to me most of the time how each download is progressing.  It’s not like I’m anxiously awaiting their completion so I can leap on them as soon as they’re done.

One of the nifty new features in Firefox 3 is that you can set a preference in about:config to prevent the download manager window from appearing every time you start downloading files.  Instead, a progress indicator appears in the status bar at the bottom of your browser window, like this:

If you need to see the download manager window, you can open it from the Tools menu as usual — or you can simply click on the download status indicator in the status bar.

The preference is browser.download.manager.useWindow.  Just set it to “true” and you’re good to go.

For me, this is a great bit of polish that makes my day-to-day work a little bit better.

Here at WeblogToolsCollection, we see quite a bit of WordPress theme releases coming through our inbox and I’ve noticed a trend. Hardly any of them include printing support. The question I’d like to have answered is why? Is adding printer support to WordPress themes too hard? Does adding this feature take up time? Or is it that this feature is barely any use to anyone?

For those wanting to add this type of support to your theme, you can install WP-Print. WP-Print picks up where most theme authors have left off by providing printing support in such a way that end users can print either articles or comments, depending on how you have configured the plugin.

In fact, doing a search on the plugin database for the keyword of “print” brought up two pages worth of search results. Another solution for you theme authors out there is called Bunny’s Print CSS. This plugin provides two files, print-css.php which is the plugin file and print.css which is the print stylesheet.

A link to the print stylesheet will be placed in your theme’s header, providing it uses the wp_head() function/hook. An admin panel is added to the Presentations menu and it will allow you to edit the stylesheet if you make print.css writeable. You probably want to edit the stylesheet provided to your liking, though it will hopefully do most of the job if your theme is sandbox-based.

This method takes most of the hard work out of creating a print.css file, even though theme authors would most likely have to modify the stylesheet to make it compatible with their theme.

For those who would like to manually create the style sheet, there is an article on the Codex entitled “Styling For Print” which covers all of the basics necessary to make a pretty, yet functional print stylesheet to include with your theme/themes.

I hope that by linking to the Codex article and bringing this issue to light, we will start to see more themes being released with built in printing support. It’s not a deal breaker for me, but I’d rather see themes that support this feature than those that don’t. My personal opinion is that, printing support is a nice finishing touch to round off any theme, and having it built in allows me and a number of other users to stop using another plugin.

Now it’s time for you to sound off. Is this a trivial issue, or is there anyone else out there that would like to see this feature in more themes?

Tutorial - How To use a Frontpage Slideshow on your Wordpress-Blog
Perfectsurf - Online Surf Magazine, Germany - 11 hours ago
which is an open source Content Management System (CMS). The plugin is called “frontpage slideshow version 1.6″ and it was transformed into a so called ...

Updated: I’ve added step 3 ½ and 3 ¾.
Updated: More on MS Windows.

In my previous post on Python and time zones. I explained five problems with time zones in general and Python support for them in particular, and how I succeeded in solving four of them, and ignoring the fifth. But I also mentioned a sixth potential problem: Windows. Or more generally speaking, cross-platform support.

I’ve now tackled this head-on, in another two-day marathon of fiddling and testing. The result of that is a small program (a mere 365 lines of code at the moment) that will tell you what time zone your computer is in. Yeah. Really. Amazing, isn’t it? The program needs more testing, it only takes a minute or two, so please help me test it.

Why is it so big, you ask? Getting a timezone in Python is easy, right? from time import tzname, right? Wrong!

Unix and Mac OS X

Under unix and OS X tzname will not tell you what you need, because it will give you an abbreviation, like “EST”, which unfortunately can be any of three different time zones. And many time zones will have the same abbreviation even though they have different daylight saving times. What you really want is the zoneinfo database name. Like Europe/Paris, or US/Eastern. Not CET or EST. So, how can you figure it out? Well, it’s a complex multi-step story.

Step 1. Some machines have a TZ environment variable set up. It can be rather complex, and you can define up much of the time zone info, light daylight saving and such in that variable. If you do, there is no way we can figure out where you are, so we can stop there. But more commonly, the TZ variable should contain the name of a file that specifies the time zone. This specification can either be a absolute path to the file, or a name relative to the root location of zone info files. So it should either be Asia/Dubai or /usr/share/zoneinfo/Asia/Dubai. If it’s a relative path we can just verify that it is a valid time zone name, and then we are done. If it’s a absolute path, we need to pick away one part at a time, until we get a valid time zone name.

Step 2. If the TZ variable is not found, then the default timezone file is /etc/localtime. OS X and some unices like Ubuntu 7.10 will create /etc/locatime by creating a symlink from the selected timezone to /etc/localtime. So all we then need to do is to do is to follow /etc/localtime to the real filename. It will then be something like /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Canberra, and all we then need to do is to chop off one directory name at a time, until we have a valid time zone name.

However, not all unices symlinks like this. Ubuntu 8.04 doesn’t, and CentOS doesn’t. Instead they copy in the zoneinfo file to /etc/localtime when you change the timezone, so we can’t follow /etc/localtime to the real file.

Step 3. But some unices are nice enough to store the time zone in /etc/timezone, so then we can look it up there. This is true for Ubuntu, and Solaris for example. It is in this case a relative specification, ie, it’s stored as Africa/Cairo, so we can return that.

Step 3 ½. Gentoo has a file /etc/conf.d/clock which has the entry TIMEZONE with the timezone, so we can use that under Gentoo.

Step 3 ¾. CentOS has a file /etc/sysconfig/clock which has the entry ZONE with the timezone which we can use. OpenSUSE has the same file, but calls the entry TIMEZONE.

Step 4. Some unices, most notably CentOS, will not symlink /etc/localtime, and will not have a /etc/timezone. So all efforts so far to figure out the time zone will fail. But there is one ugly last hack we can do. We can simply compare /etc/localtime with all the files in /usr/share/zoneinfo until we find the correct one! Yes, ugly I know, but it works! We need to skip the files in the SystemV directory and the file called localtime, which is a symlink to /etc/localtime, but then it seems to work fine.

But of course, not all unices have a /usr/share/zoneinfo. Admittedly, most do. Also, you can in theory have a modified version of the zoneinfo file, or you can have a TZ variable that is really strange, or the computer could simply have it’s configuration messed up. We need a backup plan, in those cases all else fails:

Step 5. Revert back to using time.tzname. I know, it’s not reliable, but it works in most cases. And what if it doesn’t? Well, then you just have to bloody well configure your computer correctly!

Windows

Under Windows, everything is completely different. Well, there is one thing in common: time.tzname is useless. This is of course mostly Microsofts fault. This is how it works on Windows.

Step 1. The time zone info of your computer is stored in the registry. Now, I like the registry, I think it is a perfectly good idea to store all configurations in one place. Really. Just remember to back it up. It’s also easy to edit, and you can search in it. That’s So much better than having 200 configuration files spread out over the hard disk. However, the API to the registry is done by somebody with only half a brain. First you open a connection to the registry. All is well. Then you open the key you want. Fine. Then you want to know what subkeys there are. Well, you can’t. No, you have to ask the key for how many subkeys it has, and then loop through them, asking the id of each subkey. The same thing goes for values. It’s really stupid. So stupid in fact that the standard Python module is called _winreg, because it only wraps this API, and it is so stupid that the Python people refuse to call the module winreg, reserving that name for a module that has a useble API. It doesn’t exist yet, though. Yes, this means that you can’t just get the value “something”. You have to loop through all values until you find the one called “something”. Amazing.

However, the person who designed this, either was not alone in the stupidity, or he was one of the top designers at Microsoft, because the time zone support is just as moronic. The registry keeps track of loads of information about your selected time zone, but for some reason not the name of the time zone! How stupid can people get? Even the complete morons who designed the file format of zoneinfo files understood that you need the name of the time zone. They just didn’t realize the names should be unique. Instead Microsoft stores the the name of the time zone as displayed in the dialog box where you change time zones. Yes, really, as displayed. They store not the name of the time zone, but the title. This is amazingly stupid in itself. But it doesn’t end there. Yes, you guessed it, that value will be translated into the language of the installed Windows. So, when you look up what time zone you are in in the registry, you will get different results for the same time zone if you run a English Windows and if you run a French Windows. Fantastic, isn’t it? The level of stupidity involved here is truly something extraordinary.

Step 2. Of course, Pythons time.tzname will return these display values. This makes time.tzname completely useless. So to figure out which time zone is selected, you have to loop though all the time zones that exists (in another part of the registry) and compare the display values with the ones used. Yes, really, you have to loop through. Because, as mentioned, the display values are internationalized, so you can’t use a fixed lookup table. But anyway, now you have found the time zone. All is well? Of course not.

Step 3. Whoever designed the Windows time zone implementation was not only a moron, he was also on drugs. Because the time zone names does not have any standard or even reasonable naming scheme. Forget the wonderful “Europe/Stockholm”. Of course they don’t use “EST” or “Eastern Standard Time”, that wouldn’t work, the names must be unique as they are keys on the registry. No, instead they have their own scheme. “US Eastern Standard Time” is at least resonably intelligent, but “Arabic Standard Time”? Are Arabs only allowed one? Why does then the United Arab Emirates have GMT+4, while Saudi Arabia has GMT+3? “E. Europe Standard Time”? Didn’t “Eastern” fit? “E. South America Standard Time”. Eastern South America!? Yeah, that’s a well recognized geographical and politcial entity… It must be, because there is a “SA Eastern Standard Time”, i e South America Eastern Standard Time as well. The difference? Well, who knows. And of course, the favourite: “Romance Standard Time”. Named after what? Rome? The Romance in France? The Scandinavian romanticist movement? No, the people that cam up with this must have been on drugs, and pretty heavy ones too.

Any way, the solution to this was to write a script that loads a file with conversion data from unicode.com, which keeps an up to date version (I hope) and convert that to a mapping between Microsofts names to zoneinfo database names. Of course, these names are different in Windows 95 and Windows XP, so Windows 95 will not work. I make some wild guesses on Windows 95, but generally I just ignore it. I also have no idea how translation of timezones works on Windows 95, as I only have the english version. It looks like (but I’m not sure) that they don’t translate the values in Windows 95. It would be fun to confirm that, but Windows 95 support is a rather low priority…

So there. Now we know what time zone on Windows (at least XP), OS X and most unices. That was easy, wasn’t it? Yeah, maybe not.