Stylish 0.5.3 beta is ready. This version offers a few bug fixes. Namely:
Try it out, let me know if there are any problems.
A lot of the links on this blog don’t work. I’m trying to get the old URL set-up working. If I can’t within a couple days, I’ll switch to the boring old ID-based URL system.
Update: five minutes later, and everything works. Hurray for responsive support people!
Finally, got the time to get this blog going again. I’ve just moved from Dreamhost to HostingRails. I’ll offer a bit of comparison. Yes, those are referral links below because I’m greedy.
In my opinion, HostingRails is definitely better than Dreamhost for Rails hosting. Dreamhost offers a ton more of bandwidth and disk space for a bit more, so it may be good for static or PHP sites.
When copying data over to the new host, I found that phpMyAdmin’s export/import function doesn’t like UTF-8. International characters get messed up in the transfer. Just thought I’d save some poor soul some time and say that if you run into this problem, just use mysqldump on the command line rather than trying to find some option in phpMyAdmin.
As you may know, userstyles.org has had uptime and performance problems in the past. Based on past discussions with Dreamhost, my current host, the problem seems to not be one of bandwidth, but of server resources to generate my dynamic pages.
Now, I don’t really think I’m doing anything too ridiculous when I generate pages, so I’m going on the assumption that Dreamhost’s Ruby on Rails setup is less than ideal. To test this out, I’m going to try out a new server.
I have a copy of the site set up at 821use.owen.hostingrails.com, hosted on HostingRails.com. It’s not a live copy, so feel free to screw around with it. It currently has the main site (minus screenshots) and forum installed. It doesn’t have the blog or the Mantis installation yet.
I want people to try it out for a few days and see if anything is broken (or more broken than it is on this host :)). After that, I’ll point the userstyles.org domain to it and see how it acts. If it acts well, it’ll become the permanent home. If it doesn’t, I’ll take advantage of HostingRails.com’s money back guarantee.
HostingRails.com doesn’t provide nearly as much bandwidth or disk space as Dreamhost, but at the level of bandwidth I need it’s actually cheaper.
Based on the feedback I’ve received, I’ve thrown together a list of features that I think (and hopefully you think) will make the sumo forums great. This isn’t finalized, so feel free to comment on that document or add any other ideas you may have.
I’ve been contracted by Mozilla to help set up the forums for sumo, Mozilla’s upcoming official support offering. I’m quite excited by this, not only because I’m getting paid for something I’d do for free :), but also because my past experiences providing Firefox support have made me eager for a way to do things better. The mozillaZine forums have many dedicated and helpful volunteers, and I believe it’s been one of the prime factors in Firefox’s success. However, I believe that things could be improved; one of the major problems is that the software is designed to be a general-purpose forum instead of specifically a support forum.
I’m looking for feedback on what people think is important in a support forum. These things can be software features or things like best practices that you believe would be helpful to contributors or end users. Using this feedback, I’ll put together a priority list for the developers for the software features and write document drafts for the process things.
Feedback is welcome on this mozillaZine thread and in this newsgroup posting.
I’m losing track of all the things I’m supposed to do, so I’ve put up a bug tracker at bugs.userstyles.org. Feel free to report bugs on userstyles and Stylish in there. Before putting in crazy feature requests, it’s probably best to discuss it in the forum first.
There used to be a bug in Gecko where calling removeChild on a node with an event listener attached makes the node lose the event listener. This bug is present in Firefox 2.0, but won’t be in Firefox 3.0. One unexpected result of this bug is that if the user customizes their toolbar, all event listeners on all the toolbar and menu items will be lost, even if the user didn’t do anything to them. The simplest way to get around this is to set the onwhatever attribute on the elements rather than attaching event listeners. This is what the Firefox UI does. However, there are special challenges we face coding from extensions. We’ll often want to not only add new items, but modify the behaviour of existing items that likely already have onwhatever attributes. We could do something like
element.setAttribute("oncommand", element.getAttribute("oncommand") + ";myExtension.foo()");but that’s terribly ugly and is prone to break if the existing oncommand throws an error or something else changes it.
The best way I can think of to deal with this situation is to have a different event set the event listener. For example, Stylish puts additional items in the View -> Page Style menu. I want to run a function when the Page Style menu opens to create these additional items. I can’t do it with an event listener on Page Style, because that gets wiped when the toolbar’s customized. Page Style’s menupopup already has an onpopupshowing attribute. So what I could do is add onpopupshowing and onpopuphiding attributes to the View menupopup that add and remove my event listener on the Page Style menupopup.
var stylishBrowserOverlay = {
(...)
init: function() {
(...)
var viewMenuPopup = document.getElementById("view-menu").firstChild;
viewMenu.setAttribute("popupshowing", "stylishBrowserOverlay.addPageStyleListener()");
viewMenu.setAttribute("popuphiding", "stylishBrowserOverlay.addPageStyleListener()");
(...)
},
(...)
addPageStyleListener: function() {
document.getElementById("pageStyleMenu").addEventListener("popupshowing", stylishBrowserOverlay.showPageStyleMenu, false);
},
removePageStyleListener: function() {
document.getElementById("pageStyleMenu").removeEventListener("popupshowing", stylishBrowserOverlay.showPageStyleMenu, false);
},
(...)
}
In reality, I just let the bug exist. Customizing the toolbar doesn’t happen very often and doesn’t warrant a hackish solution like this for such minor functionality.
I’ve been fairly busy lately helping out with sumo, the official Firefox Support project. One way or another, I should have more free time within a month, and I intend to make some more changes to userstyles.org. These include finishing off the performance improvements I started, another look at categorization, and super-feeds that provide authors both comments and threads about their styles.