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.

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.)

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.

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.)

Links Like This is a Firefox extension I wrote last year that allows you to automatically open multiple links from a webpage. I released the first version in May of 2007 but never really went back to update or improve it; that's about to change.

During a recent conversation about Links Like This, I realized how poorly I designed the interface. For example, after right-clicking on a link and selecting "Open Links Like This...", you used to see this confirmation dialog:

It's a modal dialog, meaning that you can't interact with the page until you've closed the dialog. The problem with this is that, oftentimes, you can't see all of the links that have been chosen as "links like this" until the dialog is closed. This problem becomes even more severe when the dialog reads "Open these 143 links?" and you can only see two or three of the highlighted links.

With the latest update, selecting "Open Links Like This..." from the context menu yields this dialog:

It's not modal, meaning that you can still scroll up and down the webpage when the dialog is visible, but it will stay on top of the webpage until you deal with it. Additionally, selected links are no longer marked with an ugly red border:

Now, they have a pleasant yellow background.

Much better, no? This small upgrade is the first of several I have planned for the next few weeks.

You can install this update at Mozilla Add-ons; if you find Links Like This useful, please consider writing a quick review on the right side of this page. Once a couple of users have given it positive reviews, I can ask Mozilla to make it a public add-on, which would make it available to all users, not just those logged in to Mozilla Add-ons.

Yammer is a service designed to help co-workers keep each other up-to-date on their work progress by answering the question "What are you working on?"

Yammer Time is a Firefox extension that reminds you to use Yammer. By default, every 4 hours between 9AM and 5PM on weekdays, it will pop up this obtrusive prompt:

Just tell it what you're working on (you are working, aren't you?), and it will go away for the next 4 hours. You can change how often it asks (and on what days) in the Preferences dialog. You can also manually update Yammer by clicking on the Yammer Time toolbar button.

You can install Yammer Time from Mozilla Add-ons.

I had been told that after upgrading to Firefox 3, it would only need 15 terabytes of RAM...