MozillaZine UpdateMonday May 3rd, 2004We thought we'd give you a brief update on a couple things here at the site. First, we're proud to announce that the forums, which are roughly a year and a half old, have now reached 40,000 members, and over 500,000 posts. They have become the main venue for users and developers alike, and have also become one of the more valuable support resources in the community. As part of our effort to help with Mozilla support, we will be recruiting new support personnel to help us help others in the support forums. Second, we have put together a new resource for folks to keep up to date on the front page news, an Atom feed, which will mirror what's available on the main site. The Atom feed is addition to our RSS and plain text feeds. This is the first time we have made the full articles available to folks via syndication and we hope it helps folks who read the site in various aggregators/news readers. (We recommend the Forumzilla extension for Thunderbird and Mozilla, or Newsmonster) Finally, we have added some new folks to our growing list of hosted blogs. New bloggers include Brendan Eich and his roadmap updates, a new Firefox blog from Ben Goodger, plus blogs from Chris Hofmann, Mozilla Developement director, Marcia Knous, project manager and Gervase Markham, Bugzilla and licensing guru. You guys rock!! Anyone who has been following this site since it's beginnings knew the forums were going to be a dramatic addition/extension to _the_ site for Mozilla news and advocacy. Keep up the great work! --Asa I notice that the RSS feed is still set (wrongly I believe) as text/plain. This means that XUL based readers like aggreg8 can't render it. It used to be set as XML, could it be put back to that? John "I notice that the RSS feed is still set (wrongly I believe) as text/plain. This means that XUL based readers like aggreg8 can't render it. It used to be set as XML, could it be put back to that?" Not sure how it got changed to text/plain but it's text/xml now. Alex I think I've looked at all of them. Of the ones recommended, NewsMonster works, but is large and complex. It may be overkill for many folks. (I have NS 7.1 installed seperately from Mozilla and use it as a NewsMonster engine.) ForumZilla is promising but quirky. It refuses to parse some feeds others accept, and I can't see a way to tell when and why it decides to update forums. I've had forums suddenly fill in for no obvious reason well after others have updated. It installs in Thunderbird or the Moz Mail/News client, but clicking a link to an item produces an odd HTML display, rather difdferent than you see going directly to the link. I've no idea what might be going on there. If you are a Mozilla/Netscape user browser, Aggreg8 is also a good choice. If you use Firefox, there is a nifty RSSReader extension from a Japanese programmer that may be the most elegant. You specify a Bookmarks folder as an RSS feeds folder, and create bookmarks for any feeds you want. Run the reader extension, and it processes the feeds and displays your list in the Sidebar. Click a link in the Sidebar, and the result is displayed in a Firefox tab. To remove a feed, just delete the bookmark. It's available from Extension Room, and the homepage is here: http://fls.moo.jp/moz/rssreader.html ______ Dennis Hey, I use this site quite a bit, but I wouldn't call the forums "the main venue for developers".... The main venue for developers continues to be bugzilla, with occasional admixtures of personal email and newsgroups. Well it depends which developers... Ben Goodger and Scott MacGregor use the forums (Scott more than Ben), and some developers of extensions and themes do also. Seamonkey, Gecko, and overall Mozilla.org stuff, as you say, mostly happens elsewhere. In terms of users, there's more Mozilla (Seamonkey) support questions and discussion in the newsgroups than in the mozillazine Mozilla forums, which aren't very active. |