MozillaZine Launches Mozilla Blogging Project, Knowledge Base and Donation DriveMonday February 9th, 2004As you can see, MozillaZine's looking a bit different. Today, we are happy to announce some of the new features that we've been working on to improve our coverage and support of the Mozilla project. Firstly, you'll notice that the front page has moved to a new three column layout, featuring a weblog post at the top. A lot of important stuff happens on blogs, and we want to make sure you don't miss anything. We plan to do the same for important forum posts in the coming months. Secondly, we're officially launching our new Knowledge Base. We've had this up and running for a little while now in beta, and we think you're going to like it. The KB uses the same software as the popular Wikipedia open-source encyclopedia, MediaWiki. A Wiki allows anyone to not only view it, but also add, edit and remove information. We're hoping that in the coming months, enough folks participate so that we can use the content to build an enterprise version, which will help the Mozilla Foundation to land more licensing and support deals, and secure further funding for the Mozilla project. We'll have more on the enterprise stuff in the months to come. Finally, we're launching our third annual donation drive today. We have just about outgrown our current server and with all these new features planned, along with more on the way, we're looking to once again expand our server infrastructure by leasing a second server. We estimate it will cost four thousand US dollars to cover the hosting and bandwidth costs of both the proposed new server and our current one over the next year, so we're setting that as our target. In response to past concerns that we only accepted PayPal, we've added two new ways to contribute, the Amazon Honor System and NOCHEX. Amazon takes basically the same types of payments as PayPal does, and is an alternative for those who don't like PayPal. NOCHEX is for residents of the UK who have a debit card, which is virtually everyone with a bank account. No, we can't accept checks or cash sent to our houses or anything like that, and no, we're not adding banner ads again, so don't ask. If you do not wish to donate then please continue to enjoy the site free of charge. No one should feel pressured to donate. It's entirely optional. Following these new features, we plan to continue adding more to MozillaZine in the coming months, including faster, more stable forums, even more developer weblogs, and a variety of enterprise-focused tools. Stay tuned! Did Firebird change name? Someone playing with the Wiki? Clicking on "Mozilla Firefox" still brings up info about the FireBIRD though. Confused :) unfornutally not, ben's blog says: "As you've probably noticed, we've changed the name again." unless today is april 1st..not anyway, not good for branding/marketing... I know it's a codename but people already had some recognition for Phoenix, later for Firebird. although I like the new logo, anything's better than a duck of fire :), but what about other *birds, also I can anyone explain the following sentence: "IBM, FTP Software, O'Reilly and Associates and Firefox Will Distribute Enhanced NCSA Mosaic from Spyglass to Their Customers" sorry for another post but it seems there was a browser with Firefox in it and is somehow connected to Mosaic: http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:DZ7uHcavS-8J:ksi.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/archives/WWW-TALK/www-talk-1994q3/0647.html+Firefox+browser&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:jktCChsIEroJ:www-cg.cis.iwate-u.ac.jp/tools/BrowserCounter-1.2/agent_971106.html+Firefox+browser&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 http://www.google.com/search?q=Firefox+browser&num=20&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&safe=off&start=20&sa=N So "Firebird" conflicted too much with that database after all? I hope they didn't change just for the heck of it :P The Knowledge base looks great people! The ramake of the front page also looks great. Speaking of the Knowledge base, how is the user submitted info going to be reviewed? And is there anyway we could have a Photo Album Addon to the forum/News section? I think it would be quite useful. check out www.nma-fallout.com to see what I mean. The site of the addon: http://smartor.is-root.com/ Does any excess cash get given to the Mozilla Foundation? I'd like to see a scheme where any excess donated would automatically go to the foundation and in return if there's ever a donations shortfall the foundation could help out with Mozillazine hosting costs as this is really a useful service for the Mozilla community. Knowing that donating to here would also help the foundation would be a good thing Its not like these drives generate tons of cash. I doubt there's ever excess, whatever is above the target simply increases the time interval before the next one. Can't believe they've updated the links yet again and still not made them point to the right place. http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/0.8/ has never existed - sure it redirects to the correct location, but the redirecting means more load on the servers and more waiting for the users. Just took a few seconds to handle the redirect for me, because the servers are all crawling under the load... sorry, FireFox just doesnt do it for me, much prefer FireBird. I however eagerly await the next release of ThunderAardvark and SunDuckBilledPlatypus !!?! (Quote:) "A Wiki allows anyone to not only view it, but also add, edit and remove information." (End quote) That is exactly what makes a wiki an unreliable source of information. Any fool can write anything he darn well pleases, and the reader at any given moment has no way to know if the information he is reading at that moment is trustworthy. True, but its a stepping stone for something grander: (Quote)We're hoping that in the coming months, enough folks participate so that we can use the content to build an enterprise version, which will help the Mozilla Foundation to land more licensing and support deals, and secure further funding for the Mozilla project.(/Quote) Enterprise version would be much more reliable, and wiki is a good way of generating content. congrats to the mozillazine team for all these new things! bart Special thanks to Jason Kersey and Brian Ryner for being here at the office to help with the release also! Good choice - this should ease all those paypal concerns. Amazon has to be the most trusted online payment system. Hardly. PayPal processes more payment volume for more buyers and more sellers than Amazon by a large margin. Double or triple that for eBay. About the knowledge base, I was wondering: is it acceptable for the average user to add to/modify entries, or are we supposed to get permission first? For example, at http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.phtml?title=Firefox_:_Issues_:_Tooltips_Don%27t_Work the page states that FireFox does not support ALT text tooltips, which is true. However, the only solution given is to contact the web page author to have them change the web site. Even though I do not personally use the "Popup ALT text" extension, I feel that for someone who wants to temporarily fix the issue, this is a viable alternative to contacting a webmaster. Adding a link to http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/popupalt as an alternative solution seems like an appropriate thing to do here. This is not a post about breaking web standards or discussing how ALT text to be used. I just want to know if it is acceptable to make changes in situations similar to this. Wikipedia (whose software was used to power this Knowledge Base) has a phrase "be bold in updating pages." If you see something wrong, just fix it. Also, if you think that what you're about to add might be controversial, you can click on Discuss this Page and ask for a consensus on the issue first. - MXN Well, looks like the web site redesign has a few bugs. For instance, when you click on Forums using Mozilla v1.6 you get this: Warning: mysql_error(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /www/prod/sites/mozillazine.org/forums/htdocs/db/mysql4.php on line 330 Warning: mysql_errno(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /www/prod/sites/mozillazine.org/forums/htdocs/db/mysql4.php on line 331 phpBB : Critical Error Could not connect to the database N That has nothing to do with the main page redesign. The forums are obviously down at the moment, probably due to the DDoS attack created by the Firebird > Firefox name change in combination with the 0.8 release. What's the "Mozilla Blogging Project" all about then? It's mentioned in the title, but not any where in the body... It is mentioned, if you can figure out what they're talking about: "You'll notice that the front page has moved to a new three column layout, featuring a weblog post at the top. A lot of important stuff happens on blogs, and we want to make sure you don't miss anything. We plan to do the same for important forum posts in the coming months." That featured weblog post (which is headed "Mozilla Blogging Project" in the sidebar) is it. The blogging has been happening for some time - there's a weblogs link in the navigation box on the right. We are not able to continue with this transaction because the recipient is unable to receive payments through the Amazon Honor System at this time. Help! When I try to start Mozilla/Firefox I keep getting an error message: Alert - The connection was refused when attempting to contact start.mozilla.org - and the page does not load. Why? I have made it my default browser and I can't firgure out what might be conflicting with it. I have it installed on my other Dell and I love it, it works great. I have an e-mail that I had wanted to send later, but I realize that I need to edit. I cannot figure out how to retrieve it and delete/edit it. |