Oftentimes I want to make a chart with that data, which requires me switching database servers, looking up the MySQL CSV syntax on morgamic’s blog, and scp’ing the CSVs to my laptop.

I’ve grown tired of doing that, and tonight I finally did something about it: MySQL Output Converter

It’s a simple little page that lets you paste your MySQL results that look like this:

mysql> SELECT * FROM word_replacements;
+----+-----------+-------------+---------------------+
| id | word      | replacement | created             |
+----+-----------+-------------+---------------------+
|  1 | favourite | favorite    | 2010-01-22 01:06:59 |
|  2 | centre    | center      | 2010-01-22 01:06:59 |
|  3 | flavour   | flavor      | 2010-01-22 01:14:30 |
|  4 | colour    | color       | 2010-01-22 01:14:30 |
+----+-----------+-------------+---------------------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

and turn them into this:

"id","word","replacement","created"
"1","favourite","favorite","2010-01-22 01:06:59"
"2","centre","center","2010-01-22 01:06:59"
"3","flavour","flavor","2010-01-22 01:14:30"
"4","colour","color","2010-01-22 01:14:30"

It can also convert the data into an HTML table if it’s going directly to the web. Please feel free to use my copy if it’s useful to you (everything is client-side JavaScript; nothing is sent to the server) or grab your own from the source.

My previous design with the squanda was about a year and a half old, but a few months ago it started to bother me. In recent weeks, it got to the point that I didn’t want to make any posts until I finished my new design.

I made the design from scratch with fancy new HTML 5 tags, which was super easy thanks to Mark Pilgrim’s guide to HTML 5. It focuses entirely on content rather than sidebar widgets, which is why the header is so plain and all the extras are relegated to the fat footer.

In addition to the new design, I took the opportunity to make use of some cool WordPress features I wasn’t before:

• comments are now disabled on posts after a year
• comment replies are enabled for better threading
• my posts use “more” tags now to keep things cleaner

I intend to start posting a lot more frequently, and already have a list of 7 posts that were waiting for the redesign to be unleashed.

I’m very interested in feedback on the new design, good or bad, so please leave comments here if you have any.

Today, Mozilla Labs announced Jetpack, a new experiment in extending and personalizing the Web.

I’m incredibly excited by this project and the thought of what it can become. I was a web developer before I was an extension developer, and being able to harness the power of extensions with the simplicity of jQuery opens up an entirely new platform and an entirely new community of people making the web more convenient and personal.

As a celebration of this, I wrote a completely useless Jetpack feature that I’m calling Image Swapper. It takes all of the images in your open tabs and mixes them up with each other. I mainly created it as a demo of how easy and fun it can be to make a Jetpack, and you can see that demo below:

Head on over to the Jetpack website for information on Jetpack and to get the prototype. A huge thanks and congrats to the Jetpack team for making this so awesome. I can’t wait to see what it becomes.

I’m working on bugfixes and tweaks still, but am hoping to have it ready for general use soon.

One command, called “url”, will look in your selected text for any URLs and make them into links. The other command, called “url-go”, will look in your selected text for any URLs and let you choose one to open in a new tab.

You can install the commands here.

Now to actually look at the sites I made this for.

You can add the command here.

In addition to Firefox 3 support, this version added a number of new features including a cool import progress bar, a number of bug fixes, and a new locale (ja-JP – Japanese) bringing the total number of supported languages to 20. You can see the rest of the changes in the changelog.

If I have time, I expect I’ll be releasing a minor update in a few weeks with some locales that couldn’t update this week, as well as some bugfixes for things that will probably be discovered next week. I have a few new bigger features that I’d like to tackle in the coming months, but I may not have time.

If you already have the extension installed, Firefox will detect the update sometime over the next 24 hours. If not, you can always download it or check out the new website.

I had planned on making a post about the new website comparing Google Code Project Hosting to Trac, but couldn’t get around to it. Maybe I’ll do that soon. I’ve been very happy with GCPH – it’s very simple yet powerful.

In other Password Exporter news, there’s a MozillaZine thread about what was thought to be a security issue in the extension, but which I am considering to be a request for enhancement.

Free-time project status:

• Password Exporter – Finished version 1.1 this week and is currently awaiting localization to the 20 languages it’s now in. Should be released sometime the first week of January. More details on that version will be in an upcoming post. Password Exporter has now been download over 203,000 times and has about 70,000 active users every day.
• FavLoc – Haven’t had time to work on it. Will try to find time to update compatibility for Firefox 3 sometime soon, but doubt I’ll add any new features. 28,000 downloads and 6,000 active users.
• LSU Campus Map – I haven’t updated anything since I first made it a few years ago, but it’s still very popular with people just searching for an LSU campus map. It had especially high traffic following the recent shooting on campus.
• All other projects including arraise, Startup Authenticator, Degree Analyzer, elurt, and all other ideas in my head that I detail but never start – I haven’t had time to work on and are pretty much dead.

Work project status:

• addons.mozilla.org – Remora was launched in March and the AMO team is currently working on version 3.2 to be launched in mid-January. I’ve been working on a statistics dashboard for add-on developers, and after 3.2 will be continuing to work mainly on AMO stuff, probably including a Developer Control Panel revamp with lots of new features.
• Operation Firefox – Contest was a big success and winners were announced earlier this month. Site will probably stay the way it is.
• Extend Firefox – Contest ends tonight. Future plans to be announced later.
• Rock Your Firefox – 0.6 released. Work on other milestones is not currently scheduled, and the app is pretty much in maintenance mode right now.
• Personas – Site hasn’t officially launched yet, but has been finished for a few weeks.
• Misc. other projects popping up and going away just as quickly.

The last few days I’ve been cleaning up a lot of site stuff, as I was quite shocked to find I had over 50 subdomains on this site, many of which are no longer used. I think I’ll be removing the ribbon from my pages soon, as I don’t think it’s helping anything.

To make a long story (involving MAMP, XAMPP, compiling PHP and Apache multiple times, and then back to MAMP again) short: MAMP should really include PHP compiled with gettext, as many other frustrated people have pointed out. During my battle, I asked others on the team that have been using Macs what they do for development. Some do all of their development in vim on a development server and others use a Linux virtual machine.

I had already written a basic .po string parser for the Localizer Control Panel, so I decided to make my own gettext emulator. The result is faketext, and MAMP + faketext = working Remora installation. It quickly parses .po files and will load a page in a specified language just as if you had the PHP extension installed.

Apparently there’s an inactive project called php-gettext that has the same idea but parses the binary .mo files instead. I didn’t try it because it would require many of the same modifications I made to work with AMO, and wenzel says it’s extremely slow anyway.

AMO faketext – save as config-local.php and drop in site/app/config.
Generic faketext – will probably require slight modification to detect the requested locale, as indicated in the comment at the top.

I added what I’m calling a ribbon (unrelated to Office 2007) to the main fligtar.com sites, like this blog. Clicking on it will bring down a menu of other things on fligtar.com.

I wanted to be able to easily modify an existing site to use this style and I wanted to be able to modify the menu content in one place, but I didn’t want to use PHP.

I’m pretty happy with the result (I won’t say “Mission Accomplished”), as including the ribbon without gradient can be done by:

<html>
    <head>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://g.fligtar.com/ribbon.css" type="text/css">
        <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="http://g.fligtar.com/jquery.js"></script>
        <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="http://g.fligtar.com/ribbon.js"></script>
    </head>
    <body>
        <div id="ribbon_menu" style="display: none;"></div>
        <div id="ribbon"><div id="ribbon_logo"></div></div>
    </body>
</html>

… and the gradient is 2 lines more.

The process I went through to create this reveals why it took longer than expected:

1. Determine color scheme
2. Make shiny bar
3. Place shiny bar
4. Make 4 versions of logo that I’m not happy with
5. Make 2 entirely functional menus before deciding I want the ribbon to drop down
6. Fight with IE
7. Realize that some sites (blog and LSU map) can’t use the gradient
8. Separate gradient from shiny bar and redo that area of CSS
9. Deploy to all sites
10. Fight with trac’s CSS which did not play nicely with mine
11. Win!

I called this Part 1, but my current plan is basically:

1. Implement Ribbon
2. …
3. Profit!