MozillaZine

New Sidebar Panel!

Wednesday September 5th, 2001

We've been working hard on finishing up our new sidebar panel for the site, and we'd love for you to take a look at it. Click the link in the column on the right to add it, and check it out. There are some issues with scrolling, but other than that, it should work well. It lets you check for recent news, as well as build bar ratings and comments, along with links to the rated builds. If you have problems or feed back, feel free to post in talkback, or send mail to Jason.

#1 And A Massively BIG Respose Field!!

by asa

Wednesday September 5th, 2001 8:24 PM

Thanks so much for finally making the response field usable.

--Asa

#2 Wow

by SbooX

Wednesday September 5th, 2001 8:44 PM

Thats got to be the best sidebar I've seen for any site easily. I didn't even think it was possible to make the sidebar look non-sucky!

#3 I love it!

by AlexBishop

Wednesday September 5th, 2001 8:48 PM

A fantastic use of Mozilla's technology. Shame about the scrolling bug though.

Alex

#4 Can the sidebar on the site itself be updated?

by gssq

Thursday September 6th, 2001 1:04 AM

fetchBuilds - stuck at M18 screenShots - stuck at M14

and such

#5 Re: Can the sidebar on the site itself be updated?

by macpeep

Thursday September 6th, 2001 1:36 AM

As evident from 100 requests over the past two years - no it can't. People have sent emails, volunteered to maintain the screenshot section and what not. But nothing.. No reaction. If it wasn't for the fact that there are still new articles here every once in a while, I'd be seriously worried about Chris Nelson. ;)

#7 Heh

by gssq

Thursday September 6th, 2001 5:00 AM

Oh puissant webmaster, where art thou?

#11 Build Bar

by toxy

Thursday September 6th, 2001 7:47 AM

It would be nice if you could show the date of the build.

Or perhaps you could point out if there is a recommend build on the server that is newer than the installed build.

I hope that you understand my english ;-)

Tobias

#20 Re: Re: Can the sidebar on the site itself be upda

by kerz

Thursday September 6th, 2001 11:57 AM

So, I'll point out, while people volunteer to help out and update it, I've only had one person actually follow through. We're working on screenshots right now, and hope to have new ones up by the end of the week.

#26 Updating Mozillazine pages

by illsleydc

Thursday September 6th, 2001 2:28 PM

Perhaps it would be better if the controvertial pages (fetchbuilds and screenshots) were just taken down until they get updated. This would undoubtedly shut people up and perhaps give them more incentive to do the work themselves :-)

Just a suggestion,

David

#27 Updating Mozillazine pages

by illsleydc

Thursday September 6th, 2001 2:29 PM

Perhaps it would be better if the controvertial pages (fetchbuilds and screenshots) were just taken down until they get updated. This would undoubtedly shut people up and perhaps give them more incentive to do the work themselves :-)

Just a suggestion,

David

#6 Font size

by odd

Thursday September 6th, 2001 4:19 AM

The content font size is too small here. Mozilla sep 06 nightly build, X11 Windowing system. It's just one pixel or so too small.

#35 IDIOT!

by odd

Friday September 7th, 2001 8:39 AM

The font looks good in Windows, there must be something wrong with your X11 setup!

IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!! IDIOT IDIOT!!!

#8 Javascript...

by SmileyBen

Thursday September 6th, 2001 5:06 AM

Will it ever be possible for Mozilla to tell that a link is to an XPI command (or whatever you'd call them), and thus warn you if it won't work without Javascript? I was trying to work out why the link didn't do anything, and eventually realised it was because I'd disabled JavaScript a couple of days ago. I know they look just like any other link, but since Mozilla interprets them curiously, surely it's possible?

#9 Wow!

by SmileyBen

Thursday September 6th, 2001 5:07 AM

Funky, btw! Very cool!

#14 Re: Javascript...

by dveditz

Thursday September 6th, 2001 9:56 AM

Actually the more likely direction is that XPInstall scripts should run whether JS is on or off, just as the chrome does. If you want XPInstall turned off there is a pref for that, and it should be a separate issue from whether or not web pages can run JS content.

#18 Re: Re: Javascript...

by johnlar

Thursday September 6th, 2001 11:25 AM

What the heck are you talking about? To add a sidebar, you must execute the following code. window.sidebar.addPanel("Title","URL.xul",""); perferably using an onclick. Which is javascript, no way of denying it. This site also uses extra javascript to detect if your browser can handle window.sidebar.addPanel, if not it tells you to use mozilla 0.9.4 :) To execute chrome is looks like a url just simply chrome://hfjds.xul which isn't javascript in any way.

#19 Re: Re: Javascript...

by johnlar

Thursday September 6th, 2001 11:26 AM

opps sorry about making it look like a link? whats the way to type a url in mozilla and have it type out the url as opposed to creating a link?

#22 Re: Re: Re: Javascript...

by gwalla

Thursday September 6th, 2001 12:54 PM

MozillaZine does that automatically (and it's MozillaZine that does that, not Mozilla). I don't think you can get around it.

#23 Re: Re: Re: Re: Javascript...

by astrosmash

Thursday September 6th, 2001 1:01 PM

h t t p : / /host/dfsfs/xul

#30 Re: Re: Re: Javascript...

by basic

Thursday September 6th, 2001 11:32 PM

An alternative is to handle a special xpi MIME type that mozilla handles. For authors who don't have access to the MIME type could use the type="" attribute as a work around (maybe).

basic

#10 Nifty

by Tanaaln

Thursday September 6th, 2001 7:12 AM

I like it.

#12 One slight problem

by Salsaman

Thursday September 6th, 2001 9:23 AM

The install only seems to work if you have the sidebar open. Perhaps you should mention this.

#13 WFM with sidebar active but collapsed

by hodeleri

Thursday September 6th, 2001 9:33 AM

I had the sidebar collapsed but still active, and it installed fine (it just didn't show up on top)

#15 Re: WFM with sidebar active but collapsed

by macpeep

Thursday September 6th, 2001 10:18 AM

Yeah, and I installed with the sidebar turned off and it installed fine.

#16 Re: One slight problem

by joschi

Thursday September 6th, 2001 10:57 AM

ditto for me.... i had to unhide my sidebar before installing it by hitting f-9

#17 sux to me

by i5mast

Thursday September 6th, 2001 10:59 AM

too many ui widgets, different fonts (including bold/colors) for such a small area. ui should look much simpler. preferably all of these tabs should have the same font type/color/size and background. in other words, have a consistent look. IE tab for History looks much cleaner and simpler. that's just my first impression

#21 Buildbar section

by sab39

Thursday September 6th, 2001 12:11 PM

The buildbar section doesn't show what date's builds it's referring to. This imho is a great drawback because I often check the buildbar just to see whether there are any new comments there - if I can see at a glance that the latest buildbar comments are from Sep 4 and today is Sep 6, I know that I don't need to read them if I already did yesterday :)

#24 CSS2 and HTML 4.01 Tabs from Eric A Meyer

by skeeter

Thursday September 6th, 2001 1:18 PM

Hi While were all here talking 'My Sidebar' here are some from that CSS Guru Eric A Meyer. http://developer.netscape.com/evangelism/sidebar/index.html

Really handy tabs for you scripters who need that quick reference.

#32 Wow, very cool !

by Salsaman

Friday September 7th, 2001 7:11 AM

n/t

#25 What? No RDF!?

by hodeleri

Thursday September 6th, 2001 1:22 PM

Get rid of that icky javascript array stuff and use some RDF! Then this sidebar will be a true example to all of the power of the lizard.

#28 Re: What? No RDF!?

by kerz

Thursday September 6th, 2001 4:47 PM

I've actually been trying to get this to work for most of the day, with no luck. As far as I know, mozilla doesn't support having the RDF be remote, which means this won't work. Drat.

#36 Re: Re: What? No RDF!?

by hodeleri

Friday September 7th, 2001 9:25 AM

Yeah, the RDF and the XUL have to be on the same server. I've had no end of difficulty getting templates to work :(

#29 Too clustered

by tseng_mike

Thursday September 6th, 2001 9:42 PM

Way too clusteredthe build bar should just mention the the last day that the build comment is updated.

the news, there should be only the news title, and the number of comment. the news abstract would be nice too.

#31 Remember the unfold build bar or remove unwanted

by spaetz

Friday September 7th, 2001 3:06 AM

Can a sidebar set cookies? If yes it would be great if the view of the build bars would be persistent. I am e.g. only interested in the Win buildbar. But you have to compress Linux/Mac everytime again. Even better would it be to make the unwanted ones :invisible

#37 Re: Remember the unfold build bar or remove unwant

by jcf76

Friday September 7th, 2001 9:57 AM

It should be able to; the sidebar is a regular Web page that has to be reloaded from the server every time its tab is clicked.

Now whether the page author still has enough motivation left to make it happen, well that's another story :)

#33 make my own sidebars

by shin

Friday September 7th, 2001 8:22 AM

I noticed you used a javascript method to add the sidebar to Moz, while back in the days the method I used was that kind of link:<br /> [ a href="http://dirt.netscape.com/cgi-bin/sidebar.cgi?title=Title&URL=http://url/sidebar.html" ] link [ /a ] <br /> <br /> Is this method still supported ?

#34 make my own sidebars - doh, fixing

by shin

Friday September 7th, 2001 8:25 AM

Doh, got to redo the link: [ a href=" http :// dirt.netscape .com/cgi-bin/sidebar.cgi?title=Title&URL= http :// url/ sidebar.html" ] link [ /a ]

(I'm trying to understand how that comments board works...)

#38 Updated

by kerz

Friday September 7th, 2001 3:11 PM

If you tried it and didn't like a few of the nits, give it another try. I updated a bunch of the CSS, and hopefully made it easier to read. I'm working on moving it to outliner, but right now that's on hold because of various bugs. Thanks for the feedback!

#39 Re: Updated

by SbooX

Friday September 7th, 2001 6:23 PM

How about making the mozillaZine logo a clickable link? Its kinda annoying that it turns into a hand icon but clicking it does nothing. Or is it just my POS system doing that? 2001090408 Win32

#40 Just beware of bug 98548

by Hendikins

Saturday September 8th, 2001 2:39 AM

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98548

Cousin to 86723, occurrs with this sidebar panel.

#41 nice, but build id missing

by incogniro

Sunday October 7th, 2001 4:54 PM

all in a all, a nice side bar, even looks good. but: it just says "good build" et al, but omits the build id. having that information, the sidebar would be real nice. could look like: "build bar for oct 06 2001 || current build id: 2001100503 || windows: blah blah || mac: blah blah || linux: blah blah" or the such.

#42 nice, but build id missing

by incogniro

Sunday October 7th, 2001 4:55 PM

all in a all, a nice side bar, even looks good. but: it just says "good build" et al, but omits the build id. having that information, the sidebar would be real nice. could look like: "build bar for oct 06 2001 || current build id: 2001100503 || windows: blah blah || mac: blah blah || linux: blah blah" or the such.