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.

• December 10th, 2010

  Using Google Chrome-style locales in Firefox extensions

  In which I simplify cross-browser extension translation.

• September 13th, 2010

  My experience with developing a freemium browser add-on

  In which I discover that selling something that used to be free is hard.

• March 26th, 2010

  Ambilight for Your Browser or: Monetizing an Add-on with Fat Plug

  I’ve written a new Firefox extension; it’s called True Colors, and it bleeds the colors from the web page you’re viewing into the tab bar and status bar. Think of it as Ambilight for your browser. The technical details behind the extension are interesting, but I won’t go into detail on that here, since Splashnology’s [...]

• February 27th, 2010

  Making Add-on/User Communication Less Annoying

  When a new user downloads TwitterBar, there are a number of things I want them to know or questions I want to ask them. So what is the best method to communicate with an add-on user? The solution I’ve been using for a while is to pop up a dialog like this: There are several [...]

• February 24th, 2010

  TwitterBar 2.9 Available: Post to Multiple Twitter Accounts

  Version 2.9 of TwitterBar for Firefox was made available on Mozilla Add-ons today, and it has a very cool new feature: you can now use TwitterBar with more than one Twitter account. To post to a specific account, just type your message like this: I am posting to my other account. –@other_account –post If you [...]

• 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 [...]