Less Talk, More Do

I am a design engineer at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, working with the Theme Team to address the design concerns of millions of WordPress users.

• January 30th, 2010

  Uploading form data and files with JavaScript (Mozilla)

  One problem I stumble across occasionally in writing Firefox extensions is properly uploading form data that includes a file – that is, assembling the POST request in JavaScript while still maintaining the sanctity of any file or string data. You can’t just do this: var request = "--boundary\r\n some text\r\n--boundary" + fileBytes + "\r\n--boundary--"; I [...]

• December 17th, 2009

  Extending the Web, not just the browser, with Twitter Filter

  One of the things that annoys me about Twitter is the constant “check-ins” from location apps like foursquare and Gowalla. Since I don’t use these apps, I don’t especially care that you’re at the Starbucks in Dallas or that you’re the mayor of your bus stop. To solve this problem, I wrote a browser add-on [...]

• December 14th, 2009

  TwitterBar is a winner!

  (And so are you, for using it!) It was announced today that TwitterBar is one of the ten winners of the Mozilla Mobile Add-on Challenge: “After reviewing a multitude of submissions and much debate around many worthy contenders, the judges from the AMO and Mobile teams have chosen ten (10) of the best (innovative, useful, [...]

• December 8th, 2009

  Lost and FireFound

  I’ve written a new extension for Firefox, and it’s called FireFound: FireFound is an add-on for Firefox and Fennec (mobile Firefox) that helps your find your computer (or mobile phone, in the case of Fennec) if it is lost or stolen. Every time your computer’s location changes, FireFound sends a secure message to a central [...]

• December 7th, 2009

  Add-On-Con 2009

  Just a note that I’ll be at the 2nd annual Add-On-Con this week in Mountain View, CA. Add-on Con is a gathering of browser add-on developers and representatives from the browser vendors (Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft). I’ll be participating in the opening keynote discussion, which will address the question, “Do Add-ons Need a Marketplace?” The [...]

• December 4th, 2009

  TwitterBar for Google Chrome

  If you’re using Google Chrome, and you’re running the developer version that allows extensions to be installed, you can now install TwitterBar for Google Chrome. After you’ve installed it, just click on the Twitter icon in the toolbar bar, type your message, and press Enter to post your message to Twitter. (You’ll have to authorize [...]

• June 18th, 2009

  Feed Sidebar 4.0 Released

  Feed Sidebar 4.0 has been released for all users of any previous version of Feed Sidebar, and this version has two great improvements over version 3.1: You can now sort your feeds by three different criteria: Feeds are now updated constantly, rather than all at once. So if you have 60 feeds, and you have [...]

• June 11th, 2009

  TwitterBar 2.4, Now With 2% Longer Tweets

  TwitterBar 2.4 was released this morning, and the main change is that it now integrates the URL shortening service tweak.tk. The URLs that .tk generates are the shortest you can get, weighing in at 15 characters; TwitterBar’s previous URL shortener, is.gd, generated 18-character URLs. What does this mean? Well, now when you post a URL [...]