Daryl’s Flock Blog

Have you made Flock art that the world needs to know about? A few links and images are posted in the forums, but I suspect there’s more out there. Post your links in the comments or add images to flickr and tag them flockart; you can also hang out with others interested in Flock art in the Flock Art group. And how about this? If you make a full set of banners of a given size or range of sizes that we Flockers decide to feature (this’ll be totally subjective), I’ll send you some swag. I’ll start out with MarkMS, who produced the first set of banners I know of, which are available in the wiki.

Technorati Tags: flock, tech, web20

I spend a surprising amount of time each day lately asking people in the forums or on the mailing lists to submit to our bug database the issues they’re reporting. Today, I wanted to take a minute to explain why I’m asking people to do this themselves rather than trotting off to submit the bugs myself. There are two reasons, and neither of them is that I’m just plain lazy.

My first justification is that that a bug report is almost always going to be more accurate if submitted by the person who experienced the bug. You’re probably familiar with the old party game in which one person starts out by whispering a phrase into the ear of the person next to him, and it goes on down the line until the last person says what was whispered in his ear. “I dig blogging with the new browser Flock” turns into “Let’s go frog gigging in a new blouse or frock.” This is great at parties, but when it comes to bugs, we want nothing lost in translation, so I’m doing my best to stay out of the bug-logging-by-proxy business.

My second reason for directing people to log their own bugs is that I want to encourage our users — and not just the tech wonks (whom we love) — to become engaged in assuring the quality of the browser. If you encounter a problem, I want you to feel comfortable doing a quick search through the bug list and either adding your comments to existing bugs that have affected you or creating new bugs for issues for which you’re the first reporter. I think that owning bugs contributes to a sense of ownership of or investment in the browser, and that’s a good thing for our users to have. By reporting or confirming bugs, you’re directly helping to improve the quality of Flock, and I want our users to have the satisfying experience of seeing one of their bugs resolved.

Now, everybody who’s taken even a sidelong glance at bugzilla knows that it’s not the prettiest thing out of the box. It’s very intimidating to a lot of people, though it’s got some very nice features that make it a good choice for enterprise bug management. Part of our community effort is going to include trying to make Bugzilla more palatable to front-end users. I plan to provide quick views (maybe feeds) of popular bugs, for example, and Bart has already enumerated a few other things we’d like to contribute to the Bugzilla project. So the Flock Bugzilla experience will get better soon.

In the mean time, I hope you’ll start getting familiar with the bug database. If you’re having problems, hit me with questions and I’ll see if I can help out. I’d love to see an industrious community member post some simple documentation at the wiki on best practices for searching and creating bugs. (Do a good job of it and let me know and it’ll be worth some swag.)

No frogs, blouses, frocks, or flocks were harmed in the production of this entry.

Technorati Tags: flock, bugzilla

If you’re interested in portable Flock, check this out. As far as I know, nobody associated with Flock has tested it, so download at your own risk.

It pays to keep on top of the Flock staff’s feed. Last night, I posted a quickie contest invitation to post a screen shot of yourself using the Flock blog editor. Laurence Timms weighed in early and will have a shirt in his mailbox next week. Laurence was already posting about Flock without even needing a bribe for incentive. Thanks, Laurence!

Bernard Nikaj also got an early entry in, and I’m going to see about shipping a shirt out to him in Kosovo as well. Keep those comments and photos coming.

Chris posted last night a Flock Postage Stamp Contest. Basically, you design a stamp, we like it, we print it, we send you swag. It’s a good deal all around. Flock philately is phun.

Community is an incredibly important part of making a project like the Flock browser successful. We bill ourselves as the social browser, after all, so it’d be downright hypocritical of us not to reach out to our users and to facilitate, well, sociability. Further, we’ve already had a bunch of contributions from community members, and we anticipate many more.

(A brief aside here for some credit where it’s due: As blogged by Bart, we’ve already got localization files, some extensions ports, and some nifty buttons courtesy of some great early adopters such as Mark Sahawneh, ehoffmann, and forum members ademalp and e-gandalf. There are many others who haven’t even hit my radar, of course, and others who’re active on the mailing lists and in the forums. These contributions are extremely important as well, no less so for being a little less visible, and I aim to find some creative ways to reward standout members of these communities.)

Right now, our community story is filled with gaps, and I think there’s probably a fair amount of confusion about where to go for what sort of information, how to contribute back to Flock, etc. We’re going to start filling these gaps soon. In fact, I’ve taken off my developer hat and put on the community hat to lead the effort full-time. If you have a question about or suggestion for building community, I’m the guy to talk to. In the next few days, I plan to publish a community roadmap so that everybody’ll know what’s on the horizon and on what sort of timeframe (or at least in roughly what order). In the mean time, my top priority is engaging with the community. I’ve spent a lot of time responding to forum queries and have been swapping email on the flockstars list. I also plan to be more attentive to the #flock channel at irc.flock.com. Pop in and say hi when you can. If you have a question or comment and can’t get up with me in any of these other places, feel free to email me at daryl at flock.com (no Viagara or real estate offers, please). I’m eager to hear feedback about what specifically would be useful to you as a Flock community member.

Once I get the roadmap written, it’ll still take some time to implement the things it describes. In the (hopefully) short term, here are some ways in which you can participate:

• Volunteer to help! Bear in mind that even volunteer coordination takes time and effort. You may not get an immediate response, but by using this form, you’ll help us match the best people to given volunteer projects as they arise.
• Submit bugs. This is the best way to report problems with the browser. It’s very helpful to us if you do a quick search to see if your bug has already been submitted (if so, please add comments to an existing bug rather than creating a duplicate). If you find bugzilla intimidating, you can use our simpler feedback form, but don’t expect a quick response, as we’ve currently got one guy sifting through these reports. Whether we’re able to respond right away or not, we greatly appreciate your taking the time to give us feedback.
• Join the forums, where Flock users get together to discuss the browser, talk about (and sometimes find workarounds for) bugs they’ve encountered, and get aquainted with other Flockers. Our staff’s keeping a few eyes on the forums, but the focus of the forums is communicating with other Flock users. This is your playground and probably isn’t the best way to try to communicate directly to those holed up at Flock HQ.
• Check out the wiki. We’re still ironing out the relationship between the wiki and the forums. For now, this is a good place to post (and read) user-contributed FAQs, banner graphics etc.
• Join an IRC chat. Channels you should usually be able to find Flock staff in include these:
  • #flock - User Community
  • #flock-dev - Developer Discussion
• Join mailing lists:
  
  • Internationalization and Localization
  • Documentation
  • Security
  • General Developer Discussion
  • General Flock Discussion
  • Security Announcements (one-way, low-traffic)
  • Flock announcements (one-way, low-traffic)
  • Flockstars

Things that I imagine will be pretty weighted pretty heavily on the roadmap include extension developer tools, figuring out the relationship between the wiki and the forums, empowering users to help us improve our product in various ways, and getting swag out there for our supporters.

Speaking of swag, I’ll mail a Flock tee-shirt and a couple of stickers to the first person to blog a screenshot of himself or herself using Flock’s blog editor to post an entry linking to this one. If you’re the first to leave me a comment with a link to your entry, I’ll be in touch asap. Happy flocking.

I’m moving most of my Flock blog entries to a new blog in order to keep Flock clutter out of my personal blog and to keep personal clutter off the Flock blog aggregator page. I figure most people who get to that page are less interested in reading about my baby than in reading what I have to say that’s relevant to Flock. So, here goes.

Technorati Tags: flock