Daryl’s Flock Blog

I’ve had exchanges recently with several people interested in spreading Flock. Naturally, I’m very pleased that community members are reaching out to start this initiative already. But it’s not quite time yet. Priorities over the next few weeks will be getting developer infrastructure and outreach into place. This includes refining our extensions story and providing tools to help extensions developers, working with volunteer developers to come up with a reasonable workflow for incorporating patches to the browser itself, working with localizers to provide tools that will make our shipping localized builds a reality, and ironing out some trademark issues that will let us provide guidelines to those who have expressed an interest in theming the browser.

We need to have these things in place pretty early so that the development process is running as much like a well-oiled machine as possible before we start engaging more with a broader audience of users. (Recall that we’re still a developer preview.) That said, evangelizing Flock and demonstrating to users that it’s a great browser is on the not terribly distant horizon. We hope to harness the community’s energy in productive ways and to provide tools that will make evangelism painless and, if possible, downright enjoyable. But, as I said, we’re not quite there yet.

If you’re interested in getting an alert when we start formalizing evangelical community infrastructure, I invite you to add yourself to our brand new spread list. It’ll be a one-way, low-traffic push; expect an email announcement in a month or so (hopefully). Of course I’ll also announce any upcoming initiatives here. As always, I invite feedback regarding community initiatives you’d find helpful; email me at daryl at flock.com or grab me in #flock at irc.flock.com.

technorati tags: flock, commumity, spread

I’ve blogged so far about what I understood to be the first extension written specifically for Flock and another extension that shortly followed it. LouCypher pointed out to me that there’s been yet another that targets Flock specifically. What the precise sequence of these has been I can’t say. This extension goes nicely with some discussion the staff’s been having lately pertaining to screen real estate and topbars vs. sidebars, and it brings back some pre-pre-release functionality by (among other things) allowing you to view the shelf as a sidebar rather than as a floating window. As a user who likes to keep his windows maximized and hates having to hunt around for extra non-sticky windows, I find this to be a great option.

In other Flock extension news, Bogomil has come through again with a toolbar to make juggling some of the Flock sites simpler. It’s similar to the Bulgarian language extension I blogged yesterday (also by Bogomil), but it searches the Flock community and wiki sites and provides quick links to some of our top-level content. (I’d like to see the feeds site added to this, perhaps with a livemark that includes recent post titles.)

It’s really great to see all this activity in the extension development world. In the next few days, I plan to give a pretty comprehensive update on what’s going on with extensions and with the community vision as a whole. I encourage anybody with ideas on this stuff in the mean time to contact me in irc or to email me at daryl at flock.com.

technorati tags: flock, community, extend

If I’ve promised you a shirt, I haven’t forgotten you. It turns out we were pretty much out and had to order some. Now they’re in, and we’ve got a queue of people waiting on shirts. Never fear — we’ll start shipping them out this week. If you’re in the US and haven’t gotten yours within a week or so, please email me at daryl at flock.com so I can follow up. If you’re outside the US, wait a little longer, but email me if you don’t get your shirt soon. If I haven’t promised you a shirt yet, why not do something cool that’ll prompt me to do so?

technorati tags: flock, swag, community

The other day, I blogged about the first extension written specifically with Flock in mind (and capitalizing on a feature unique to Flock). Today, I’ve got another extension to showcase. It’s the first toolbar written for Flock as far as I know. Neither of these, by the way, is the first extension to work with Flock; other community members have ported a number of Firefox extensions to work with Flock, and I get daily emails reporting that extensions developers are uploading their Flock-compatible extensions to addons.mozilla.org. These two extensions are the first I know of that members of the Flock community have written specifically with Flock in mind, however, and so they’re significant.

Now for what will be bad news to many of us but what’s really good news for Flock: The toolbar integrates with a Bulgarian site and so has a pretty limited audience. What this means for most of our American community is that the toolbar will be of limited interest. But what it demonstrates for Flock is that we have a vibrant international community showing interest. In addition to this toolbar, interest in localizing into about 20 languages has been posted in our localization forums, and work on a half dozen or so of those has begun as far as I’m aware. Further, our own localization guru Gandalf (about whom you’ll learn more later this week) is working on a tool that he hopes will facilitate localization of the browser. Anybody interested in localization who doesn’t know where to start should ping Gandalf or me.

technorati tags: flock, community, l10n

A week or two ago, I posted a request for Drupal/Bugzilla integration. Nobody took the bait for that one, and as I found myself continuing to do nasty things to mark forum posts as candidates for bug reports, I figured I had better roll my own. Here’s a brief summary of what I was doing, what the community can do now, and more or less what this means for bug management within our community.

So, what I was doing. As a quick hack, I found myself adding sort of a pseudo-tag “:bugreq” in comments I left on posts in the forums that I wanted to make sure we revisited to get bugs logged for. Often, I’d ask users to log bugs but left this bit of junk behind so that I could follow up appropriately later. What this meant for me was eventually writing a little report that would find posts whose comments had that string in them and then to go search for bugs, log bugs where necessary, and report back to the forums with a bug number to close the loop. This was nasty all around, and because it was so nasty, I hadn’t gotten around to doing anything besides leaving the fake tags on a few posts. Further, it wasn’t transparent to users and wasn’t something I could reasonably expect others in the community to get on board with.

Now on to what I’ve done to alleviate the problem somewhat. I don’t have a perfect fix just yet, but the process is much cleaner now. First, a brief digression on bug gathering. I had noticed in my wordpress control panel something about a bug hunt, but I hadn’t paid it much attention. Then just yesterday, Lloyd sent me a link about knowledge gardening which also mentioned the wordpress bug hunt. This stuff’s all about empowering a community’s members to get involved in the bug management process. As noted previously, we rate our community’s being involved in the bug management process very high. One of the problems with this in our community, however, is that we have bugzilla and the forums living apart from one another. And people frequently post bug reports in the forums. So bridging the two in a way that empowers the community to help with the bridging is key.

Which brings me back to what specifically we’ve done to help facilitate such bridging. Some forum members who have stood out to me as consistent helpers within the forums have been given additional privileges. First, let me qualify this promotion and stress that if you’re a forum member who didn’t get promoted, it doesn’t mean you’re not valuable. It means only that I haven’t picked up yet on your contribution or that you weren’t foremost in my mind when I handed out privileges. I may yet ask you for help, and I welcome you to demonstrate to me that I should consider promoting you in this capacity or some other. So, moving on, what’re the privileges? In short, these bug hunters, as I’ve chosen to call them, can easily mark a post to be reviewed as a possible bug. When they do so, it’s available at a publicly-accessible page and as a feed. Anybody’s welcome to search for and log non-duplicate bugs for the posts listed, and privileged users can easily remove forum posts from the list and add bug numbers to the posts to confirm that a bug has been logged for the issue in question.

The result is that casual support requests in the forum stand a much better chance of being turned into bug reports. We now have two-way communication between the forums and the bug list. Importantly, it’s not just me or some other Flock staff member empowered to find and log the reports but is the community. For now, it’s mainly select members of the community (though anybody’s welcome to check out the list and log bugs) that are helping with the hunting/gardening/pruning/whatever, though I imagine that’ll change over time to be governed by a more self-organizing principle. If you think you’d be a good bug hunter and would like to help mark things for consideration, email me at daryl at flock.com to let me know why, or better yet, make yourself stand out in the forums by responding to queries, pointing people to existing bugs when they report things, etc.

Finally, in the spirit of open source, I’m of course planning to contribute this module back to the drupal community if they’ll have it. Here’s hoping it helps out other projects besides Flock. Naturally, I hope to improve the module over time as well, so that it becomes a better and better tool.

technorati tags: flock, bugzilla, community

Flock user and community participant Erwan Loisant has written the first known extension designed specifically for Flock. He’s tapped into our topbar UI to develop an extension that displays technorati links relevant to the current page. This is very cool and is just the sort of thing we’re hoping to make it much easier for Flock users to do in the future. Great work, Erwan!

technorati tags: flock, extend, community, topbar

Forum user compfreak221 posted a link to a nifty beta tool Google Maps has made available called frappr. Go pin yourself up so we can see how Flock users are distributed and so that you can connect with other Flockers in your area. Particularly interesting to me is that so far, no one west of Texas in the US has signed up, though Web 2.0 and the companies that are said to exemplify it seem to me to be Silicon Valley-centric.

technorati tags: flock, tech, frappr, community

1. Use Flock! Specifically, keep on top of hourly builds to monitor how we’re progressing and to test ongoing changes.
2. Report bugs. It helps us most to have bugs reported against hourly builds. See the wiki for some bug-reporting guidelines.
3. Filter bugs. It’s natural for there to be duplicate bugs or bugs that could use more detail, and we could use help resolving these sorts of issues.
4. Help other users. If you see somebody in the forums or on a list asking a question you know the answer to, chime in with friendly instructions or an informational link.
5. Respond to press. Take a minute to respond politely to blog posts about Flock, providing tips and additional information where possible. We’re working on tools to help us track our response rate to Flock news on the web.
6. Engage with the community. Here are some ideas: Collaborate to write wiki entries listing the top 50 most annoying bugs at any given time; do the same for a top 20 features list, using bugzilla as a guideline in both cases. Organize contests among yourselves; create Flock art (don’t forget to tag it “flockart“); create your own Top X lists; emerge, emerge!
7. Localize Flock. Start with the tutorial, and then engage with other localizers in the forums or on the mailing list.
8. Volunteer. We anticipate having all sorts of opportunities available, from massaging data to web development to more formal bug filtering. Let us know how you’re best qualified to help, and we’ll match you up with fitting opportunities as they arise.
9. Talk to us. We’re very eager to provide tools that’ll help you build a vibrant community around Flock. Email me at daryl at flock.com to let me know what you think would be useful, or better yet, join the flock-discuss mailing list and share your thoughts with others as well.
10. Spread the meme. Write your own blog posts about Flock. Add banners to your site. Wear swag (it’ll be available soon).

Technorati Tags: flock, community

As noted the other day, I’m trying to encourage the Flock community to log bugs themselves. I haven’t had a chance to gauge just yet how many are actually doing this. I do keep seeing bug reports in the forums, and I contine to suggest that people log them as real bugs, but I worry that if we’re not careful, some of these valuable reports will fall through the cracks.

For now, as I comment on these reports, I’m adding a little pseudo-tag to my comment that I can go back and search for later to make sure these entries do in fact have bugs logged. But it promises to be sort of a nasty process. First, I leave little garbage pseudo-tags in my comment; then, I’ll have to endure the tedium of ensuring that a bug is created for each of these. Here’s what’d be neat:

Each forum post has a button I can push to convert the post and comments into a bug report at my bugzilla installation. At minimum, it should send the link as the url associated with the bug, and ideally, it dumps the content of the forum thread into the bug. In an ideal world, it also gets a response from Bugzilla that tells it the bug number, and it adds a comment to the forum thread that includes a link to the bug that’s just been logged.

It’d also be neat if each forum post had a small text box that would allow me to type in a bug number and that would add a comment including a link to the bug when I did so.

I think this’d be just a great bit of integration between Drupal and Bugzilla, and it seems like it’d be of some use to the broader community of open source developers. Does such a thing exist in hiding somewhere? Is there anybody who’d be willing to whip something like this up?

Technorati Tags: flock, bugzilla

Flocker
    
n.
          1. One who works as an employee of Flock.
          2. One who uses Flock, especially if active in the Flock community.
          3. A program that converts Firefox extensions into Flock extensions.

Geoff Gauchet has written a little app that lets you drag a Firefox extension onto it and that spits out a Flock-compatible version. This is a great tool for those of you who’re waiting on your favorite extensions to be ported before making the switch to Flock. I hear that the tool doesn’t port all extensions yet but that it’ll soon support more. Great work, Geoff!

As for Flock-hosted extensions, we’re working right now to get the extensions site up and running with updates and the ability for extensions developers to submit their own extensions. In the mean time, Geoff’s efforts will help get current Flockers through. This is certainly worth some swag. Geoff, look for an email from me today.

Right now, Flocker works only on Mac and PC. If somebody does a Linux port (especially if it supports both a cli interface and a gui interface), you can bet I’ll send a shirt and some stickers your way.