chofmann's weblog

FLOSS Manuals: Changing the Publishing World One Book at a Time.

Update: Checkout the SUMO blog for more information on the upcoming Firefox Book Sprint on Thursday.

Millions of people have ideas for book they would like to write. Many of those people hold out the hope that some day they will get the time, write this book, become famous, and become rich.

It's too bad that all of these things need to come together to make interesting books happen more often. Anyone that ever been involved in the publishing of a book will also tell you that fame and fortune from books are pipe dreams, especially with any book related to software. Software is just two much of a moving target to keep in sync between the software and the book. Even fast track books take 6-9 months to make it though a publishing cycle, and in 9 months any piece of good software has evolved way beyond the book.

The FLOSS Manuals Project wants to change all by bringing open source concepts to publishing. They are engaged in building a platform and community designed to get interesting books published and do it on faster cycles. I recently had a chance to participate in a FLOSS Manual Book Sprint as they worked on a Firefox Manual

7 Things

Axel tagged me. I'll get even with him some how, some way.

seems like planet is already way overloaded and now this. oh well, I can't resist testing the power of the network that is the firefox/mozilla nation.

The *one* love of my life and I will celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary this year. Here we are in the magical kingdom of St. Andrews.

We have *two* kids, Rachel and Sam.

*Three* if you count sparky.

*Four*, if you count the Miata, even after being scraped up a bit on hwy 85 a few months ago. The Miata just went over 164k amazing miles. The miata will never die.

Most proud of the fact that for *five* years now Firefox has gained browser market share, and IE has declined.

If you have heard one of my talks you know there are *6 things* that are key to every browser release. Take your eye off the ball on any of these and you better watch out for disaster. Creating the right balance among all of these 6 areas is tough, but if you can do it you build a browser that just "feels right" and people will adopt. Can you name the 6 things?

Spoke at conferences and evangelized Firefox, Mozilla, and Open Source Development in *seven* different countries outside the US last year (Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Mexico, and Spain). The fact that Active Daily Users doubled in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico last year still blows me away.

I tag

* Marcio
* Guillermo

those two are trouble!

and

* Felipe
* Ricardo
* Leo
* Arun
* Suneel

someone tag these guys if they haven't been already...

* seth
* tenser
* gandalf
* stas
* dougt
* jslater
* rolo
* ken

New PC Retailer Gives Discount to FireFox Users

Cool!

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/1/prweb601572.htm

Active X Migration Guides?

Doron and others have produced a great guides that help in migrating away from proprietary IE features that aren't available in browsers that support and are compliant with web standards.

Stuff like http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/index.php?title=Migrate_apps_from_Internet_Explorer_to_Mozillahttp://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/index.php?title=Migrate_apps_from_Internet_Explorer_to_Mozilla

Does anyone know if similar guides, case histories, or best practices exist for developers that want to migrate away from ActiveX?

Ramping up Firefox Support Option Discussions and Work on Improvements

Back at the end of last year I started a thread seeking some ideas on how we might improve support for Firefox users. There was a lot of great feedback from folks that are involved in helping Firefox users in a variety of ways using a number of different systems. A few of us a Moco (Sam Sidler, JT Batson, and Jay Patel) have carved out some dedicated time over the next few months work on some of the suggestions made in the thread on Mozillazine, and engaging with others that want to help out on improving the support systems we currently have in place. We will also be interested in looking at possible new systems that could help solve some of the existing problems.

We will be kicking off some weekly conference calls, setting up a newsgroup, and possible "support summit" for those that have interest in this area. Watch for more details soon. I've also posted a summary of the prolems/suggestions that have been surface in the past few months. You can view those here:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=494282&postdays=0&postorder=asc&postsperpage=15&start=60

Building better support options for Firefox users

I've started some discussion on the topic at http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=494282

If you have thoughts, comments, or ideas about improvements for this area I'd be interested in hearing about them in the forum or e-mail to me...

Location entry now available to drive Minimo Map.

Google has added a geocoding API so we updated the minimo map service to add a form entry bar and use the service to position the map. It makes driving the map and quick access to locations a bit easier. Here is what it looks like.

More info about the new gecoding API and type of entries supported in the form entry can be found here.