I was thinking it would be neat to add a recommendations component to Feed Sidebar. It would work like this:

1. You'd opt in to share your list of feeds anonymously.
2. Your list of feeds is sent to a central server.
3. Other users do the same thing.
4. Magic happens.
5. The Feed Sidebar would occasionally recommend a new feed based on what other people like you are reading.

Would anyone besides me use this? I know that other Web-based feed readers have similar features, but those of us who control our own data are getting left out in the cold.

I am going to be abandoning development of the Yammer Time extension for Firefox. I no longer have the time or motivation to maintain it.

Is there anyone out there is interested in taking ownership of it? If so, e-mail me at cfinke@gmail.com, or leave your contact info in the comments. It's fairly simple as extensions go, so even if you're just getting started with addon development, you shouldn't have any problems understanding the code.

I've been working on decreasing the CPU consumption of my Feed Sidebar Firefox extension; one of its main problems is that when it's time to update the feeds, Firefox can grind to a halt while the Sidebar starts to make tens or hundreds of HTTP requests.

A solution I've settled on allows the sidebar to slowly work through your feeds list, spreading out the updates over the interval you've set (e.g., update every hour), so that there's never one big update. For example, if you have 50 feeds, and you have set Feed Sidebar to update them every hour, it will now update a single feed every 72 seconds (60 minutes / 50 feeds = 72 seconds per feed), rather than updating all 50 feeds at the same time every 60 minutes. However, in order to keep the sidebar working as it previously did where all of your feeds would update as soon as you started up Firefox, the sidebar will still do one initial update, leaving only a second between each feed update.

You can install this beta version right here if you want to take advantage of the new update mechanism. Some changes that you'll notice:

• The statusbar no longer shows text like "Next update: 4:32 PM". This is because your feeds are always being updated.
• As each feed is updated, text will appear in the status bar like so: "Updating 1 of 50 (Joe Smith's Blog)..." You can click on this text to visit the site of the feed that is being refreshed.
• If you click "Mark All as Read", it won't affect any feeds that were refreshed less than 3 seconds ago. This is to avoid accidentally marking things as read before you realized they were there.
• There is now an option to disable automatic updates completely.
• You can still quickly update all of your feeds at any time by clicking the Reload button in the sidebar.
• The pop-up notifications that used to appear after a full update ("100 new feed items") are now specific to each feed. The title is the name of the feed, the image is the website's shortcut icon, and it will either say "2 new items" (or 3 or 4...), or if there's only one new item, the title of that item will appear in the notification box.

I'd appreciate any and all feedback (comment on this post, email cfinke@gmail.com, or ping me on Twitter) so that when I release this to the general Feed Sidebar public, I'm not inundated with e-mails saying "Why didn't you do it this way?" (Again, you can install the new version here.)

Everyone's favorite tool for posting to Twitter from your Firefox address bar (TwitterBar) has been updated to version 2.0. Changes in this version include:

• URL shortening
  • Long URLs are now shortened by http://is.gd/ before being sent to Twitter. is.gd offers the shortest URLs around, so you have more room in your tweet for your words. (TwitterBar's character counter takes into account the fact that all of your URLs will only be 18 characters long when they're posted, so you always know exactly how much room you have left to tweet.)
• Support for OAuth.
  • OAuth is basically a way to allow applications (like TwitterBar) to act on your behalf (update your status) without having to disclose your Twitter password to the application. So it’s safer for you, since you don’t have to worry about malicious programmers stealing your usernames and passwords, since you never gave them out. After you upgrade to this version of TwitterBar, you’ll have to authorize it once, but then you’ll never have to do it again.
• Bug fixes and code cleanup
  • These are good!

You can download TwitterBar from Mozilla Add-ons (for free!), or you can wait for Firefox to automatically notify you of the update. (By the way, if you want to connect with me on Twitter, I'm @cfinke.)

When Google released a document today showing the design process for Google Chrome extensions, I thought it would be fitting to have one of the first third-party extensions for Chrome address a major shortcoming of one of Google's other products. With that thought, I give you:

Install TubeStop for Google Chrome

What is TubeStop? It's an add-on that stops YouTube videos from autoplaying, whether you're on YouTube.com or anywhere else on the Web. It was originally written as a Firefox add-on.

(In order to try it out, you need to be running the developer version of Chrome, and you may need to invoke it with the "--enable-extensions" flag.)

To install TubeStop, just download the tubestop.crx file linked above and drag it into Chrome. After Chrome finishes animating a download icon, TubeStop is installed. You don't even need to restart the browser; you are now free to browse the Web without the imminent threat of YouTube autoplay.

For more information on Google Chrome, check out Mahalo's Google Chrome topic page, embedded below:

I've published an update to the beta of Feed Sidebar that I talked about here: Sort Your Feeds in Feed Sidebar. In this version (3.2pre2), I've made the following changes:

• Enhanced the sorting mechanisms so that updates occur more seamlessly.
• Added some accessibility fixes, courtesy of Marco Zehe.
• Fixed some security holes related to JavaScript injection in the preview window
• Added a little delay to Feed Sidebar's first feed update each browsing session to allow Firefox to start up a little more quickly.

I'd appreciate any and all feedback (send to cfinke@gmail.com) so that when I release this to the general Feed Sidebar public, I'm not inundated with e-mails saying "Why didn't you do it this way?" You can install the new version here.

A lot of people have asked for the ability to sort the feeds that appear in the Feed Sidebar extension for Firefox, so I've taken some time to integrate some basic sorting options. I would like to get some feedback on this feature before releasing it to the general Feed Sidebar audience, so I've uploaded a version for testing here. (You may have to save it to your computer and open it with Firefox in order to install it.)

The sorts I've implemented are:

• Default: Sorts the feeds in the order that you added them to your bookmarks. This is how your feeds have been sorted up to this point.
• Name: Sorts the feeds alphabetically by feed title. (This doesn't yet ignore things like "a", "an", "the", but it will before the final release.)
• Last Updated: Sorts the feeds with the last updated feed at the top.

Please leave any feedback you have either as a comment on this post or by emailing me at cfinke@gmail.com.

Yammer Time, the Firefox extension that reminds you to update your status on Yammer, has been updated to add support for authenticating via OAuth. You can install the update from Mozilla Add-ons.

OAuth is basically a way to allow applications (like Yammer Time) to act on your behalf (update your status) without having to disclose your password to the application. So it's safer for you, since you don't have to worry about malicious programmers stealing your usernames and passwords, since you never gave them out. After you upgrade to this version of Yammer (version 1.1), you'll have to authorize Yammer Time once, but then you'll never have to do it again.

This is a Fennec fox.

I got some great feedback after I updated URL Fixer to be compatible with Fennec, Mozilla's mobile browser, and I'm happy to announce that I've been able to add Fennec compatibility to four more add-ons:

• TwitterBar: Post to Twitter from Firefox's address bar
• AutoAuth: Automatically submits authentication dialogs
• YouTube Comment Snob (still in the sandbox): Filter out lame comments on YouTube
• Slashdotter (still in the sandbox): Adds features to the Slashdot website

So far, I've found it pretty easy to port add-ons to Fennec, with the following caveats:

• You can't install add-ons in Fennec by opening them from your computer; I wrote a script to copy the add-on directly into the Fennec profile, much like an add-on IV drip - straight into the bloodstream!
• There's no easy access to the error console , but you can open it manually if you grab the address from Firefox.
• No DOM Inspector. For now, just browse the source.

It seems that all of these issues could be solved with a "Fennec Add-on Development" extension; maybe that will be my next project, unless easier solutions already exist.

Fennec is the codename for Mozilla's work-in-progress mobile browser for phones and smaller computing devices, and since it supports extensions just like Firefox, I've started adding Fennec compatibility to the extensions I've written (when it makes sense).

URL Fixer version 1.5 is fully Fennec-compatible. I think it's even more useful in Fennec than in Firefox, given the ease with which one can fat-finger a touch-screen or mini-qwerty keyboard versus on a full-size computer keyboard.

(The screenshot above is from Fennec running on Mac OSX, so your visual results may vary depending on your device.)