PatCavit.com

I’ve continued my streak of trying new things by playing around with Firefox extensions over the last couple of days. There’s definitely some fun to be had though like anything else gotchas always arise.

I started out looking at SA Last Read because it needs some help and I use it all the time. Duz from SA has done a bangup job getting things converted over to using MozStorage (which is awesome) but the preferences dialog isn’t setup to use the newer preferences. I took a crack at that and have pretty much failed to comprehend what is going on. SALR is more or less way too big and messy for me to wrap my head around at this point. I find this incredibly frustrating and more than a little embarrassing.

So to make myself feel better I toyed around with writing my own extension, basically aiming to duplicate SALR’s core feature (coloring threads based on how far you have read). So far I’ve tackled the tricky issue of Firefox firing the window.onload event multiple times as well as started getting my feet wet with XPath. I’ve done some XPath tinkering previously but that was long enough ago that it has all fallen out of my head. I also fiddled around with some basic MozStorage/SQLite stuff for fun. It reminds me of PDO in PHP, which is handy because I already know PDO. I’m not sure my “NotSALR” extension will ever be completed or even functional, but it’s a fun way to learn some of the ins and outs of Firefox extension development.

I still have a Flickr drag & drop upload gadget on my plate, as well as the rather poorly-named RSSticles. The Flickr API is great as far as APIs go but I just haven’t been feeling like dealing with a remote API lately. RSSticles has a bunch of issues surrounding it that I haven’t come up with a good method of solving yet as well. Flickr’s limit on 5 pictures per contact is frustrating beyond belief. I’m tempted to try and come up with a way to get around it but there’s no method for getting recent photos from a contact. Shoud I cache picture data, or just recreate the feed fresh every time? Ugh, hopefully I can come up with good solutions for it but I’m not hopeful so far.

The gadget was put on hold mostly because developing on my laptop sucks. Once I order my new computer bits and get it put together I’ll probably jump ship to Vista and then I can get some actual work done. 1280×800 is just so tiny when compared to 3200×1200