The Extend Firefox 2 winners were announced today, and while I didn't win one of the 3 awesome grand prizes, my submission, URL Fixer, rounded out the list of runner-ups (runners-up?).

First place was taken by Minimap Sidebar Extension by Tony Farndon, which intends to make map/traffic management in the browser less painful; I have to admit, it looks very cool. I'll be installing it as soon as it supports the latest Firefox beta.

After a series of delays, the new Mozilla Addons site (codenamed Remora) went live late last night. Changes to the site include redesigned visual aspects, localization, and an overhauled discussion/comment system, but probably the biggest change you'll notice is that new extensions do not undergo a mandatory approval process before being available for download.

As extensions are uploaded, they are relegated to the "Sandbox." This means that while they won't appear in search results or under their respective categories, the author can still take advantage of Mozilla's free add-on hosting by pointing users directly to their add-on's download page. Sandboxed addons can be nominated for general availability by requesting an editor review, but according to Mozilla, this should be reserved for addons that are of use to the general population and enhance the Web browsing experience, and I fully agree. We don't need the site cluttered with hundreds of "gam3rHax.com Forum Toolbar" extensions that are only used by their author.

As far as my extensions go, ScribeFire and URL Fixer have been deemed public-worthy, and I've nominated OPML Support. I'll probably leave the others (Slashdotter, GoogleTabs) in the sandbox, as they're not really what I consider "general use."

Update: It looks like the site has been rolled back to its previous state; I can't determine why, but the Mozilla Webdev blog will probably post an update. You can still check out Remora at the Mozilla Addons Preview site.

I just found out that Mozilla is considering including the functionality of my URL Fixer extension as part of the base Firefox 3 install. A great idea (if I do say so myself); however, they won't be the first browser to do so.

I've updated URL Fixer to version 1.3.1; new features since 1.3 are a Czech translation and a fix so that it no longer tries to correct www.orf.at (a popular Austrian news site) to www.org.at (not a popular Austrian news site).

You can install or upgrade URL Fixer from its homepage.

I just posted this week's Netscape 9 update at the Netscape blog: Netscape 9 Saves You Time:

"Netscape 9 will be the first major browser to automatically correct common typos entered in the location bar. The browser will watch for nearly 30 different types of common mistakes and correct them for you (asking you to confirm, if you choose to enable confirmation), hopefully saving you some time and frustration in the process."

Additional forum for discussion at Netscape.com.

Until URL Fixer got Dugg last week, I hadn't had a good real-life example for my Social Traffic Monitor Wordpress plugin. What follows is an analysis of the traffic my blog received from social news and bookmarking sites late last week, as recorded by the Social Traffic Monitor plugin.

This is the chart that the Social Traffic Monitor generated for my URL Fixer page, showing visitors per hour from Thursday morning to Monday morning.

The first small hump is when URL Fixer was featured on Download Squad (and subsequently, Lifehacker) on Thursday morning. (The page had been submitted to Netscape some time ago, which is why the plugin was already logging the traffic at that point.) The huge orange spike is when the post hit the front page of Digg, at about 11PM Thursday night. Traffic was huge that first hour, but it halved by the next hour, and then slowly tapered down as the post moved to the second page of Digg, and then the third, etc.

The orangish hump in the middle of the graph is traffic from StumbleUpon. As you can see, the traffic from SU was never as intense as it was from Digg, but it was more consistent, and longer-lasting. (Just as those are good qualities to have in chewing gum, they are desired assets of website traffic as well.) StumbleUpon continued to drive heavy traffic to the post for about 10 hours, and then in smaller amounts of the next day and a half. Most of the visitors to the URL Fixer page are still coming from StumbleUpon.

Overall, I received about 8,000 visitors from StumbleUpon, 4,000 visitors from Digg, 2,000 from Lifehacker, and about 600 from Download Squad. (Del.icio.us barely registered with about 200 referrals.) So although StumbleUpon sent the most visitors my way, it appears that the traffic coming from Digg was the most appropriate to the content: according to my traffic logs, from Thursday night to noon on Friday, over 60% of visitors to the page actually downloaded the Firefox extension. After that (when visitors starting coming from SU), only about 15% of visitors were downloading the extension.

If you have a Wordpress blog and would like to track how many visitors you receive from social sites, download and install the Social Traffic Monitor Wordpress plugin.

After giving it a workout this week with all the visitors to my blog from Digg and StumbleUpon, I've made some changes to the Social Traffic Monitor plugin for Wordpress, and I'm releasing version 1.2.

Since version 1.1, I've added StumbleUpon as a social news/bookmarking source, fixed a few bugs with logging non-social-referring sites, and I've added the option to supply a formatting string for the plugin's output. What this means is that you can now call the plugin like this:

	<php social_traffic('<div>%s</div>'); ?>

and the the plugin will replace the "%s" with its output, but only if it has something to display; otherwise, it will display nothing at all. This allows you to add borders, positioning data, or just your own custom code to the plugin's output. (Calling social_traffic(); is equivalent to calling social_traffic("%s");.)

To upgrade, simply download and unzip version 1.2 and upload the included social-traffic.php to your wp-content/plugins/ directory.

Just got this automated e-mail:

The domain chrisfinke.com has reached 90% of its bandwidth limit for January. Please contact the system admin as soon as possible.

Thanks a lot, Digg! I better lay low for a while... :-)

While I was reading over the comments at Lifehacker's post on URL Fixer, I came across this critique:

[...] I've run into one little problem with this sucker. I avoid bookmarks like the plague and, instead, create keywords to jump to sites by typing in one word or a short phrase. Anyway, one of my keywords was the term "intranet" which linked to my office's internal database pages. This extension would always turn that into intra.net which would send me out into the web for a site that I didn't actually want to visit. [...]

This situation hadn't occurred to me before, but now that I'm aware of it, I've updated URL Fixer to check first if the text in the URL bar is a shortcut URL, and if so, to leave it alone. Thanks, dashifen!

Welcome, readers of Lifehacker and Download Squad. I hope you find URL Fixer as useful as I do.

Feel free to check out my other extension and software projects, and if you find any of it interesting, go ahead and subscribe to my feed. I typically write about Firefox extensions, my job at Netscape, and other technical items of interest on a semi-daily basis.