YouTube Comment Snob got some press from the BBC's Webscape segment; the coverage starts around the three-minute mark, right after a very complimentary bit on Jay Meattle's Shareaholic.

There's no point to this post; it's just a collection of memories I have about launching one of my first websites.

The first website I ever built was called "The Humor Archive:"

• It went online in late 1999 at the URL http://ticon.net/~finke/. The motivation behind the building of the site was that our ISP offered free Web space to all subscribers; my dad agreed that I could use the space if I learned how to create a website, so I chose to use the spacious 5MB to build a collection of funny lists and jokes. I curated the archive by copying/pasting funny things I found online (usually without attribution, because I was young and didn't know any better), and I also included a new humor column each week written by my dad. He didn't write them specifically for my site; they had been published previously in a number of Midwestern newspapers.

• I dutifully submitted the site to various directories and search engines; at some point, I realized that I was getting the short end of the stick from dmoz, since it listed sites in alphabetical order. That's when I had the stroke of genius to rename "The Humor Archive" to "Absurd! The Humor Archive." I would later rename it again in an attempt to game the listings, this time to "!Absurd! The Humor Archive." My SEO skills were obviously ahead of their time. (Looking back through the archives of alt.html, I realized that I had originally named the site "Did you hear the one about?...", but changed it after this response from legendary Finn Jukka Korpela.)

• Not long after I launched it (using Notepad and WS_FTP), I noticed that my odometer-style hit counter was jumping up by dozens each time I would refresh the page. As it turned out, The Humor Archive was the fourth result when AOL users searched for "humor." That high placement didn't last long, but the feeling while it did was exhilarating.

• For a short while, I ran a mailing list called "The Daily Laugh." I doubt I sent out more than five editions of the "daily" laugh over a period of six months, but I never bothered to change the name to "The Occasional Laugh."

• When my family moved and I no longer had access to our old ISPs Web space, The Humor Archive disappeared. Surprisingly, someone actually noticed.

Eventually, I took The Humor Archive offline and forgot about it.

UNTIL NOW!

I've collected the pieces of the site that I could find online and in my backups and reinstated it at humorarchive.efinke.com.

Sharp-eyed readers with a memory for early-21st century websites may recognize the header graphic as coming from FlamingText.com. I was unable to find the original header image, but as it turns out, FlamingText is still up and running, producing exactly the same graphics as it did ten years ago, so the current header is a faithful reproduction. (I don't remember why I chose cows as the theme for the site - besides the bovine header, the list bullets are all little cow heads - but it was probably because cows are hilarious.)

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 problems with this approach, all of which I decided to ignore when I implemented it:

• It steals the user's focus.
• It's annoying.
• The user might click cancel without reading it just to get rid of it.
• It's annoying.
• The user might immediately (but accidentally) click elsewhere, hiding the dialog behind another window, never to be seen again.
• It's annoying.
• It's extra code and work to pop up a special dialog like this.
• It's annoying.

Back when there was only one dialog, I decided that these were acceptable faults. However, since then, I've come up with a few more questions I want to ask users, so now instead of one annoying dialog, there are three or four annoying dialogs - a new one appearing each time you restart Firefox.

Predictably (or so it should have been), users don't like to be assaulted with new dialogs each time they start their browser. Most likely, they're starting their browser for some purpose other than using my add-on, so my add-on shouldn't steal their attention. As one user so elegantly put it,

"I really love the TwitterBar, but after the most recent TwitterBar update, I noticed I kept getting these annoying as hell pop-ups from TwitterBar about TwitterBar. After the third one (while I was in the middle of doing something and became distracted with this pop-up dialog box TwitterBar tip of the day), I uninstalled it. If you want to keep your clients, don't constantly tap them on the shoulder."

I had already been working on redesigning these add-on/user interactions when I got that email, so the user's message reinforced what I had suspected: I was alienating my userbase.

Here's the new scheme I've settled on for now:

It's a notification bar, much like the one that appears when Firefox blocks a popup. It has these positive qualities:

• It doesn't steal focus or interrupt the user.
• It's not in-your-face, so it's less likely (I assume) to be dismissed without thought.
• It can't be lost behind another window.
• The amount of code to implement it is less, and it's more in tune with the browser interface.
• It's not as annoying.

I'd love your feedback on this change. Is it enough? Should I stop bothering users altogether and just let them discover their way around the add-on? I'm open to all ideas.

(If you'd like to try a version of TwitterBar with this new notification method, you can download it here. Although, if you've already seen the old dialog-style version of these notifications, you won't see the new-style ones anyway.)

"December: Jesus is the reason for the season."

"November: It's probably cold out. Stay in and do a puzzle."

"October: Better harvest the crops before they freeze."

"September: Bonfires, ghost stories, and s'mores."

"August: Everyone loves to take a dip in the pool."

"July: School's out; video games are in."

"June: Perfect for getting a golden brown tan."