What’s Happening With The www.mozilla.org Site

I’ve been periodically posting updates on changes being made to www.mozilla.org, but I haven’t provided much information about our overall plans and goals for the site. We just finished a planning meeting that covered a lot of relevant information, so it seemed like now was a good time to talk about what’s happening.

What is the purpose of the site?

When www.mozilla.org was launched in 1998 all activity occurred on the site. The community has obviously grown over the years and there are now many different sites that focus on different parts of the project. To reflect these changes, we feel that the purpose of www.mozilla.org needs to evolve to become a portal to the community and to be a place to host official content and policies.

In practice this new vision means that the site will go from being a home for over ten thousand pages that deal with documentation, news, advocacy and a range of other topics to a site with perhaps fewer than a hundred pages that mainly provides links and references to content hosted in other places. This transition was started a while ago (for example, by moving documentation over to the Mozilla Developer Center) but we’ll focus on completing this in the near future.

What changes are we making?

Getting from the old version of the site to a new version is a big chunk of work and we’ve decided that it’s best to gradually make changes instead of trying to update everything at once. Here are a list of several of the things we’re doing right now:

• Updating pages: We’ve been steadily making updates to sections (such as the About and Community pages) of the site to make sure things are up to date.
• Reorganizing structure: To reflect the site’s new purpose we’re going to change the top-level navigation of the site from Products, Support, Store, Developers, About to Projects, Developers, Community, Contribute, Foundation, About.
• Refreshing the design: We don’t want to redesign the site, but we think that getting some design help on the home page and the site templates could make the site easier to use and could make it feel more like the entry point for the Mozilla community.
• Reducing content: As mentioned earlier, there is a lot of content now on the site that should be moved somewhere else. We are planning on migrating some of this content to other sites and then archiving other pages.
• Selecting owners: In order to make these changes we’re finding people to take on all of these tasks. If you’re interested in working with us, you are certainly welcome to join in (just keep an eye on mozilla.dev.mozilla-org for discussions about the site and for information about upcoming planning meetings).

For more information about these plans, take a look at our planning page. I’ll also continue to post news and updates about the site as we make more progress. If you have any thoughts or comments about any of this, feel free to post here.

Locavore Life

I just finished reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and have gotten so excited about growing some food that I just bought a sixth fruit tree for our new orchard (although my wife has suggested I calm down a bit since we don’t yet own a house that has a yard where we can plant these trees). Our orchard now includes: an avocado tree, an apple tree with three varieties grafted on to it, a blueberry bush, and lemon, lime and oranges trees in the citrus section. I suspect I’ll get at least a couple more soon — I’ll get a kiwi tree (do kiwis grown on trees?) if I can find one (they are apparently local since there were kiwis at the farmer’s market) and maybe an apricot or cherry tree too.

So the book was good and is definitely worth reading to help give you a good persceptive on our food culture and explain why eating locally, even a little, can be beneficial. There’s too much to summarize here, but I did want to point out one funny Calvin Coolidge related sexual anecdote (go read about it on Wikipedia) and one complaint I had (go read about it in the next paragraph).

The book talks about the horrible conditions of factory-farmed cows and chickens, but then ignores the fact that the condition of factory-farmed fish isn’t very pleasant (or healthy) either. The book also talks about raising heritage turkeys to help keep these breeds from going extinct, but then the author talks about how see misses wild-caught alaskan salmon and tuna without mentioning that fish populations are plummeting around the world. It’s interesting that she would have this blind spot, since one theme of the book is that being distant from the source of your food makes it difficult to understand what you are eating and how your food choices effect your health and the health of the environment. That certainly seems to be the case here — she may be living on a farm with turkeys and asparagus, but she’s still physically removed from where the fish live (I also think the fact that fish are anatomically more removed from us relative to most farm animals can help explain this blind spot and can explain why some people who say they are vegetarians eat fish but not chicken or beef).

Up next, a switch to fiction with Landscape Painted with Tea.

Developer Sites for Top 50 AMO Add-ons

Many people who host the development of their extension on mozdev also distribute their work on addons.mozilla.org and not surprisingly we’ve received a number of requests to make managing projects in both locations easier for developers.

From these requests and from other discussions with project owners, we’ve known that more integration would help some developers but we haven’t had any specific information about how many people would benefit. Well, today I had the idea that I should just go and look at how many add-ons on AMO have mozdev listed as their developer home page. The results for the 50 most popular add-ons are below:

I think there are a few interesting things to see here. First is that most people are hosting their own developer site, but of the project hosting sites mozdev is by far the most used (I have no idea if this ratio holds across all of AMO and would be interested in doing a more complete survey). There are also a number of projects that had hosted their project on mozdev at one time and are now hosting their own sites (although some of these are still using some of mozdev’s developer tools). I think this number is encouraging since it’s natural for projects to want their own site once they’ve reached a certain size and this fits in with our ideas of having mozdev serve as a community incubator.

To answer the original question though, it looks like we could make things easier for a significant fraction of the developer’s on AMO by making it easier to manage projects in both places. There are a lot of potential things that could be done (have download files sync across sites so you just need to update once, share account information so people don’t need to remember multiple passwords to deal with one extension…). If anyone has ideas for what would be helpful here, please let us know.

The Elevator World

I just finished rereading Colson Whitehead’s book The Intuitionist. I don’t often read books twice since I have a big stack of new books waiting, but I wanted to try this one again since I remember thinking I had missed something the first time (so the story is all about elevator inspectors and some of them do their job by feeling how the elevators are operating and something is certainly being referenced here, right?).

Even if I didn’t pick up on anything new, rereading books is interesting because I have this habit of sticking bits of paper in between pages whenever I have a reaction to something. It’s not clear though what bits I’m reacting to since I decided a long time ago not to highlight or underline anything — just stick a piece of paper in between the pages to let me know I thought something was interesting. This time through I left a couple pieces of paper in spots, but I also came across some paper I left several years before (a part of a boarding pass from a flight from Newark to Heathrow).

When I got to the place I marked before I couldn’t tell why I put it there and didn’t see anything particularly worth flagging. It’s not frustrating that I can’t figure it out — I just think it’s interesting that what grabbed me before didn’t this time (and vice versa for the other two pieces of paper I left the second time through). I could have marked that spot better or could have written some lines in a journal somewhere, but I wouldn’t know what to do with that information anyway and leaving bits of paper is easier.

Up next, locavore manifesto Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Moving Forward With “Powered by Mozilla”

I was happy to see some updates on what is happening with the “Powered by Mozilla” logo. As Doug Turner mentions there are certainly still many unanswered questions about how this program would be administered. Sorting that out is important and will get resolved through open discussions, but I wanted to step back from those details and offer some comments about why this program is important.

The fact is that there are now over a hundred organizations and individuals that are using Mozilla technology to build their products and applications. For the most part, these developers seem to be focused on their projects and aren’t coordinating with each other or with the Mozilla community (with some exceptions like the recent mozpad effort). Increased coordination is in everyone’s interest though. It can benefit these organizations to learn how other people are solving problems related to building a Mozilla-based application and it can benefit Mozilla to gather up the various improvements being made by these different development efforts to strengthen our core code.

Instead of just having a “Powered by Mozilla” program that creates processes and builds community around people who would apply guidelines to applicants’ registrations and monitor for compliance, I’d also like to see effort put in to building a community around those that would be applying for and using the logo. This would mean, among other things, that we wouldn’t just have a way for someone to submit a request to use the logo, but that we would go out and talk to organizations that are creating products with Mozilla code and explain why using the logo and becoming more involved with the Mozilla community is in their (and our) best interest. I think this is the real opportunity that we need to keep in mind.

Mozdev Roadmap Updated

The roadmap for mozdev.org was updated earlier this week. The motivation behind these changes was to refocus our efforts on functionality that will benefit Mozilla developers and to address the concerns we’ve been hearing about the usability of the site. More details about our thought process can be seen on the recent post about the proposed changes.

I wanted to point out some of the bigger changes that were made. We’ve been planning on adding at least one new version control option for a while and we had initially considered going with Subversion support first. In the roadmap, one of our new top priorities is to add Mercurial support (Subversion support is still planned, but it will come later). Since our mission is to support Mozilla developers, and not open source developers in general, we feel that it is important to stay in sync with Mozilla’s development tools and provide other tools that are specific to the Mozilla community.

A number of tasks that should help with the usability of the site have also been added, including making edits to a project’s web pages easier, making the creation of new projects a quicker process and redesigning the look of the site. We feel that there are many reasons why a developer working on Mozilla extensions or applications would choose mozdev.org over a general purpose hosting site, but there is no denying that the current design and layout of our site is a far cry from the usability of Google Code.

If there are any comments or suggestions about these changes, feel free to let us know.

ReGreen Guidelines

I just finished reading the ReGreen Residential Remodeling Guidelines. The document provides some case studies and numerous guidelines to follow when doing any work on an existing home (it’s a quick read if you just look at the case studies). I did pick up some useful information and helpful tips for any redesign we do on our eventual new home, but the most important thing I took away is that there are some things that are best left to professionals.

Many of the guidelines were simple and intuitive (like chosing low-VOC paints or selecting high-efficiency toilets) and I feel confident that I could do a reasonable job of taking care of these on my own. There were many other suggestions though (like assessing the vapor profile of new assemblies or using computer modeling to determine heating and cooling loads) that seem well outside the scope of a typical do-it-yourself type effort.

For something more complicated than painting walls in a new home, I think it makes sense to bring in a professional to help. This upfront cost can also pay for itself by improved planning and avoiding mistakes that have to be repaired later (and the quality of the work is likely going to be much higher than if I tried to include capillary breaks between all concrete and sill plates for the very first time on my own exterior foundation walls).

Not that a professional will necessarily be cheaper or hassle-free, but especially with green design issues there seem to be so many things to be aware of and experienced with that there’s no way I would want to devote the time and energy to doing this myself (even if I could reconfigure plumbing to distribute domestic hot water efficiently — which I can’t). My ego is intact though since I can create a lovely website of the redesign process when it’s finished

Status Update 2008-04-11

I wanted to post a quick update to mention the www.mozilla.org tasks I’ve been working on over the last few weeks:

• Took part in a site planning meeting and updated the planning page on the wiki
• Checked in new version of the About page and continued discussion of further changes in bug 231131
• Worked on drafts for new Community pages
• Posted a new version of the International Community page to bug 370222
• Updated the Featured Mozilla-Based Applications for April (OLPC browser and TomTom HOME)
• Helped manage the webmaster at mozilla dot org address by adding additional moderators and changing some mailman configurations to cut down on spam

Updating the Community pages on mozilla.org

As part of the ongoing effort to update the www.mozilla.org site, I’ve been spending a few days thinking about the Community pages. Right now this content is out of date and isn’t linked to very prominently, but I think updating these pages and making them more visible is a great opportunity (community is sort of an important part of the whole Mozilla thing after all).

I have a proposal for this section that I wanted to blog about to get people’s feedback. The details are in bug 426600 but the basic idea is to make these pages a portal to relevant resources throughout the community. I think we should have lists of a variety of different links including:

• Blogs and News
• International Pages
• Official Developer Forums
• Other Community Forums
• Websites
• Wikis

Below is a screenshot of a mockup for a Community Blogs and News page. Mockups for all of the pages mentioned above are in the bug. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Mozdev’s 2007 Annual Report

The Mozdev Community Organization (the non-profit organization that runs the mozdev.org site) has just posted it’s 2007 annual report (PDF file). The document contains an overview about what was accomplished last year, a look ahead at some of the organization’s plans for 2008 and a financial summary of the last four years of operations. This information is being provided so that community members and donors are kept informed about how contributions are used. If you have any comments or questions about any of this, feel free to leave a comment.