Paul Swartz’s PCF Devblog

I spent last week working.on bugs. I got through:

• #9554: –theme causes problems with the tray icon
• #9829: Long cobranded titles are cut off in the installer
• I Heart Miro breaks lots of extensions

This week I’ve been working on OpenCobrand which is a system for making cobranded builds a little more independent
of me and Dean and Jesse. The public builder works pretty well but I’m running into some
trouble with making the installer pick up the new theme.

At the moment, I’m try to use this Locate NSIS plugin to find the themes that are
installed. It’s working in my small tests, but not in the actual Miro
installer. I’m not confident that I’ll be able to get it fixed for a
1.2.3 release, but because it only affects cobranded builds NPR and I
were thinking we’d make a 1.2.3.1 “release” to the cobrander but not
publicize it.

I got a bug report report from Nils Maier about I ? Miro breaking other extensions because of how it detected HTTP redirects. Nils also helped me out by showing me what I should be doing, which made the fix easy. I’ve released I ? Miro 1.3.7 and Effortless Good 1.1.6 which fixes the problem.

Last week I:

• finished up the donation pitch
• fixed some bugs with I Heart Miro (didn’t work with extensions that
  used XMLHttpRequests, didn’t work with the Amazon MP3 store)
• fixed a couple bugs in Miro (#9554, #9829) and made some cobranded
  builds with those changes
• started working on #8517

I just ran into this post from Joe Solomon about I ? Miro. It’s a quick overview about what I ? M is and gives some good ideas about the future: http://www.netsquared.org/blog/joesolomon/iheartmiro-com-and-future-affiliate-program-fundraising

The Guide was just accepted into Launchpad, so now I need your help. I’m mono-lingual in human languages, so I can’t translate the strings we use into the 34 different languages for which we have videos.

That’s where you come in! Help out by translating some of the Guide over on the Miro Guide Launchpad page, and be the first on your block to see all the cool phrases that are used behind the scenes.

In an effort to increase the number of people who are using I ? Miro, I just released a version that works with Internet Explorer 7. It’s a bit more difficult to install than the Firefox extension, but it helps us just as much.

Check it out at http://www.iheartmiro.org/

The first iteration of the Miroguide API is out in the world! Visit https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/MiroGuideApi to check it out.

I spent Wednesday and Thursday trying to track down and fix #9581, where the loading spinner wasn’t working after the transition to XULRunner 1.9. Something changed about the permissions system, so the parent frame couldn’t access a function in the child frame. The work around for this was to give the two functions which turn on/off the spinner permissions to access the child frame.

Friday was spent tracking down failures in the thumbnail test cases. It turns out it was a silly bug in the test cases themselves; they were referring to an outdated URL on http://www.getdemocracy.com/.

This week I’ve been working on finishing up a new first time page which hopefully I’ll have rolled out by the call in the morning. I also started working on an API for the Guide. I’m really excited about this particular feature; several people have asked for it and I it’ll be important for when we want more integration between Miro and the Guide.

In reverse order:
* Fixed a bug in the guide where the overall popularity rank was incorrectly calculated.
* changed the template used for the category/tag/language pages for popular/top-rated channels.
* released a new version of I Heart Miro which should prevent Amazon from thinking we’re buying Google ads and also fixed some cases where URLs incorrectly had our affiliate tag applied to them
* links between the recommendations page and the ‘all ratings’ page
* created a template to display all the channels a user has rated

Lat week, I did a little bit of work with cobranded builds, but that part of my work has been pretty quiet. I also added Firefox 3 support to iHeartMiro and put out the 1.1 release. We finally put out the new moderation interface, and I think it looks really good.

Matt got a new server up for the Guide (PCF5) and I spent Friday getting that set up to take over from PCF4 (the old server). It’s much faster than even PCF4 was, so it should be good for a while.

The rest of my time has been spent with personalized recommendations. It’s coming along well and hopefully you’ll all be able to see it soon.