Archive for May, 2007

I added a History link to the top tab-bar when using the new “mdc” skin. This makes doing copy edit work much easier, since you don’t have to scroll to the bottom anymore to check the history on an article. For now, we’re keeping “Devmo” as the default skin since we plan to do a new reskinning effort to blend in with the rest of the Mozilla web site once we have some design resources (in particular, the new logos we’ve got in queue).

The “mdc” skin is nice because there’s no sidebar, so you have more room to work when reading end editing the content. You can try it out by logging into MDC and clicking the “My Preferences” link at the top of the page, then choosing “mdc” in the Skin panel.

I’ll be attending the Paris developer day on June 23rd, and will be hosting a discussion about localizing the Mozilla Developer Center. One of the biggest items on my plate is working out ways for the localization teams to work better together, and I’m hoping to meet up with some of our contributors while I’m in Paris. Hopefully we can hash out some great ideas for improving our ability to collaborate!

Yay! The gas company is finally out in front of our house working on fixing that gas leak we’ve had out there for a couple of years now. Hooray!

Turns out that our upgrade did have a few minor quirks pop up, which we’re actively working on getting fixed. The first to be fixed is that the edit toolbar was missing in the Devmo and new MDC skins. Now they’re back.

There are bugs filed for redirect pages not automatically redirecting, and for HTML in templates being shown raw instead of rendering properly. I don’t have a guess yet on when those will be fixed.

In addition, the edit section links are now back on the right side of the page, and are sized more appropriately now.

I’m still finding out about cool stuff we got for “free” with the MediaWiki upgrade, including some improved controls for blocking users (handy for coping with spammers).

MediaWiki 1.10 was released today. We won’t be installing this upgrade immediately, but should be doing it soon. We’re in the final stages of setting things up so we can do a much better job of keeping up with MediaWiki updates.

The Mozilla Developer Center is now running MediaWiki 1.9.3 (the current version), and has a few other improvements as well. There’s a new theme, called “mdc”, available if you would like to select it in your preferences. That theme has no sidebar, so there’s a little more space to work. It’s not used by default, however, since it’s not going to be our official theme.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll be working on more improvements to the site, including some enhancements to make the new breadcrumb system we’re going to be using soon a little more friendly to work with.

So exciting!

It doesn’t really require any explanation, I think, so here it is:

On October 6th of last year, I blogged about the gas leak coming from under the ground across the street from our house, that the local gas company had at that time ignored for well over a year.

On Friday, a couple of their trucks were across the street. They left after a while, having spray painted some stripes here and there.

My question is: are they actually planning to fix the leak, or were they just trying to get our hopes up.

It continues to astound me how long it’s taking to fix this. The stench of leaking gas is nearly overpowering at times. It’s been getting gradually but steadily worse for the past several months. There are days when I’m a little afraid to start my car for fear of blowing something up. It’s completely ludicrous.

I’ve just noticed that the MDC upgrade to MediaWiki 1.9.3 has been scheduled to take place during a maintenance window on May 8th. So that’s great news! Once that’s done, I can start working on all the other cool stuff I want to do to improve our site.