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The Tagging Plan for AMO

Firstly, thanks for all the great feedback. Something as seemingly simple as tagging gets complex quickly when thought out and the varied perspectives of the community are always great to have. Allowing full Unicode would let anyone use meaningful tags in their own character sets but would prevent us from offering similar matches and common [...]

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Some considerations when adding Tags to AMO

Tags broke into the limelight around the time “Web 2.0″ was becoming popularized. They provided a simple but effective way to categorize objects and many sites are using them now. Despite their proliferation, I haven’t found any documentation on the internet regarding standards for implementing tags. A tag library exists for CakePHP but it, and [...]

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Differentiate Bugzilla emails?

Bugzilla is an awesome bug tracker that is used by hundreds of companies. I’ve got accounts on several projects’ trackers and I’m sure many others do also. When I get mail from Bugzilla it’s not obvious which project it’s from. My email client (GMail) only shows the “from name” so all I see for these [...]

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How addons.mozilla.org defends against XSS attacks

One of the things that gets a lot of news time these days is XSS. There are a lot of places that explain what it is and how to prevent it but most are oversimplified or don’t provide real world examples. I thought I’d explain a couple of the ways AMO attempts to prevent it. [...]

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Verbatim Server Downtime

Translate Toolkit 1.3.0 was released a few days ago. I was following along with trunk on my development box and I wanted to upgrade our alpha install to take advantage of the new features (namely, speed improvements) and the django framework. I attempted this tonight and it was not a pretty upgrade (or install, for [...]

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Add-on Statistics Status (part 2)

This is the second update about add-ons’ statistics. Read part one. Statistics for both update pings and download counts have been updated beginning with February 1 through today, February 6th. Some notes: New statistics are stored in UTC and data processing happens shortly after the logs close. This means you can expect new data at [...]

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Verbatim: going forward

According to the high level plan, we’re currently on step 4. The Mozilla branch has been merged back into Pootle’s trunk and work on the branch has been discontinued. While writing code it became apparent that the framework Pootle was built on, jToolkit, had some shortcomings that were making it difficult to work with (not [...]

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Add-on Statistics Status

Add-on statistics have been intermittent for a couple months and are just recently getting the attention they need. Our current process is to count download statistics once per day and update ping statistics once per week (update pings are a sampling of the complete set). The reliability of the script generating these statistics has been [...]

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Kids these days

It’s that time of year again. Severe weather warnings. Iced over bridges. Rolling power outages. Bad weather and worse drivers. Back in my day kids would be wishing for woolen mittens or firewood or hot potatoes they could stuff in their pockets. Nowadays all you hear about are these interactive video games and this music [...]

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Why doesn’t the Android Market keep us up to date?

The Android platform comes with a great market available for browsing and downloading applications. Comments are easy to read, the permissions the application is requesting are clearly explained, and installing is a snap and happens in the background. Overall it’s a breeze to use. However, it’s got a large gap in it’s model that I [...]

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