We’re Experiencing Some Technical Difficulties

The newly designed site and Wiki have gone live and are working fine. The Blog, on the other-hand while completed is not wanting to go live. I’ve tried it as blog.ffextensionguru.com but something was not routing correctly on Apache. So I tried re-mapping ffextensionguru.info to go the new blog, but that still wants to resolve to the main site. I’ve completely remove blog.ffextensionguru.com and remapped it to the new blog folder. Now I am just waiting for Apache to restart and hopefully I will be able to launch the new blog soon.

Preview: Main Site

Phases 1 and 2 of the ‘big changes’ are already or nearly completed. Earlier this week, we did move over the Wiki, the main site, The Email Mafiia blog and sites and a handful of other sites to the new sever. Surprisingly, the migration went a lot smoother than I was expecting. Did some have minor issues with the Wiki, but was able to get those resolved very quickly.

As for the main site, just have a little more tweaking and adjusting to do before we launch the new main site. So far, I am very impressed with the flexibility of being able to work in WordPress. I had heard some complaints from a friend of mine about how the first page is still going to look like a WordPress Blog (shows post title, author, date, etc). Well, thanks to the Twenty Ten Weaver Theme, you wouldn’t know this was built on WordPress.

The biggest thing you are going to notice is we really cleaned up the main page. The big Facebook & Twitter widgets have been removed, replaced with buttons. The releases section has been cleaned up a bit as well. There really isn’t much going on with main page. It is acting more as landing page with links to the Blog and Wiki as well as to our sister site, The Email Mafia.

I have decided to move the Wiki to Phase 3 instead of Phase 4. The template is still going to take some tweaking, but should be fairly simple as all I will need to do is copy over the custom CSS and install a few plug-ins. The fun part is going to be moving the content from Media Wiki into WordPress.

The final phase will be the blog. That really should not take very long as I won’t have to ‘de-blog’ the template. Upload the new header, import the content then install some pliug-ins and should be ready to go. Will need to figure out how to redirect on the wordpress.com side over to my server as right now my server is redirecting to the wordpress.com site.

One more thing, since this whole process went fairly well, there’s a good chance I am going to redo the main Email Mafia site into a WordPress as well and creating a ‘wiki’ for that site too.

Big Changes Coming

I’ve been wanting to make the move to the self hosted WordPress for a while now. Unfortunately, the hosting service which is included in my reseller package at my current provider is not optimized to handle WordPress. This was kind the reason I was keeping the package with them was the hosting and some other ‘freebies’ I was getting. Towards the end of last year I noticed I really wasn’t using these free items anymore.

I happened to get a hold of a very good discount which allowed me to get a new 3-years hosting package for less than I am paying for the reseller package. Of course the fun part is moving everything over from one host to another. I’ve walked customers through this many of times so I have a fairly good idea what is involved. As of this post the main ffextensionguru.com site and wiki are down and will be for the next several hours while everything migrates over to the new hosting.

Now, I was also able to get sometime off so I have a long weekend coming up. So I will start the process of moving the blog from WordPress.com over to my new host. In addition I am looking to convert the main site into a WordPress site. The wiki is going to be going away soon. I am also going to convert that into a WordPress site too. I had some issues with the last update broke the Wiki. I was able to rollback but I don’t want to keep running on an older version as it can be a security risk. On the other hand, I don’t feel like trying to figure out what plug-in is causing the conflict. It would just be easier to start fresh as a WordPress site. This is going to make editing a lot easier as working within Media Wiki is not easy.

For the time being, the main site and the Wiki are being moved over as-is and will remain active until I make the switch over. The blog should move over fairly easily as I can redirect with the WordPress.com interface. I hope to have most of this done by Saturday, January 8th. The Wiki has the lowest priority in getting setup, but I don’t think it is going to be very difficult.

Beware of Fake Update Page

Recently there has been a fake Firefox update page (see below) has been floating around the web. This page not only tells the user they are running an out-dated version of Firefox, but that they need to update Adobe Flash Player as well. There is a link to “update” Adobe Flash Player but this is actually a malicious link:

The download starts automatically. Save and run it and you get a rogue antivirus product named “SecurityTool” which starts finding threats which aren’t there and demanding payment in order to remove them.

With the recent increase in Firefox updates (especially for Firefox 3.6) it is easy for users to get mislead into thinking there is a new update. Some tips to protect yourself against fake update notices:

• Update notifications are normally delivered via a pop-up window not a web page
• Use the Check For Updates… feature under the Help Menu if you are unsure about an ‘update notice’. If there is an update available you will get the pop-up window as described above.
• Mozilla has an official site where you can check to make sure your plugins (such as Flash Player) are up to date: www.mozilla.com/plugincheck The browser normally does not alert you to out-dated plugins.
• Current release information is posted on the main site (ffextensionguru.com) and is usually update within a few hours of the new releases. We always post a blog entry for any new releases (including the current developmental version). Also we publish a weekly Release Recap every Saturday morning.

Thanks to Gareon for posting this alert at Go Firefox!

Source: PC Magazine

Wiki Update

We will be running a patch install on the Wiki in about 45-minutes. Not sure how long this patch update is going to take but the Wiki may be periodically inaccessible starting at June 25, 2010 at 01:00 AM PDT ( 8:00 AM GMT). We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Extension Reviews are moving to the WIKI

Looks like we are about ready to move the extensions review off the main ffextensionguru.com site over to the WIKI (ffextensionguru.com/wiki) this weekend. This is the last section to moved over to the WIKI. The main ffextensionguru.com site is mainly going to be a dynamic informational page. We will have our blog and twitter feeds along with the latest release information for the current three (3.5,3.6 and 3.7/4.0) versions of Firefox.

We will also plan (time permitting) on updating the layout of the page to better accommodate the new and recently added features such as our Twitter Feed and Facebook Fan Page Status. Both the site and the Wiki should remain active and accessible during the update.

In the coming weeks the tweaks section is going to be reviewed and updated. We have received a couple reports that tweaks do/don’t work with newer released of the particular Firefox release. Also there are still some references to Firefox 3.1 (now 3.5) that some we missed in the last round. Finally, the time has come for The Guru to tryout Firefox 3.7/4.0 so can updated the existing tweaks and/or add new tweaks.

Add-ons Compilations added to Wiki

Over the past four years since this blog was started, we have posted various Add-ons Compilations or ‘collections’ of add-ons with a common theme. With nearly 1200 posts and nearly 200 of those in the ‘Add-ons’ category it can be somewhat difficult to locate these collections. To solve this issue, we have now added a new section to The Firefox Extension Guru’s Wiki. Introducing the Add-on Compilations, a complete list of all the collections that have been mentioned on the blog.

Adblock Plus Blocking Spread Firefox Images

I’ve been trying to get several of my sites updated over the past couple hours. One the things I needed to do was replace the Download Firefox 3.5 image provided by SpreadFirefox.com with a new Download Firefox 3.6 image. Should be fairly simple, all I had to do was copy and paste the HTML code from the Spread Firefox site into my website code. I’ve done this many, many times before with no problems. It even shows up in my WYSIWYG Web Authoring  Program (NVU). However, once I uploaded the pages to the server the logo would no longer show up.

I looked through my code and even copied the image source (location) directly into my web browser and the image shows up on the Spread Firefox site (sfx-images.mozilla.org). Since I had it opened, I decided to take a look at my site in Chrome and what da ya know there’s the purple Firefox 3.6 button!

Next step was to open up my Adblock Plus Preferences by clicking on the ABP icon. Sure enough I discovered a BLOCK entry (shows as red text in the list) for: http://sfx-images.mozilla.org/firefox/3.6/*. To ‘fix’ this highlight the entry press ENTER and then click ‘Add filter…’ Reloading the page should bring up the missing image.

Now, I wanted to make sure I hadn’t by accident created this Block entry so I check the site with my Firefox 3.5 profile which currently had no extensions installed. After installing Adblock Plus and restarting Firefox 3.5, sure enough the image was gone. I looked in the Adblock Plus Preferences and there it was being blocked with a filter source of EasyList (USA). Now, I have no idea why the group which distributes The EasyList (USA) filter is choosing to block the Spread Firefox images coming from the Mozilla site.

I did send a message to the Affiliates with Spread Firefox letting them know of my findings. I imagine this has been an ongoing issue, but may be they can provide some insight into this issue. I doubt I’ll hear anything back for at least a couple days though.

Update: MonztA was replied with a discussion link on the Adblock EasyList Forum from June 2009 where the affiliates were complaining ABP was breaking their site (along with globally blocking their images). They have since White Listed spreadfirefox.com affiliates button section URL, but not the images URL. The reasoning behind the latter was simply because these are ads, for Firefox.

After some thought on this, I’ve come to the realization that yes I am trying to advertise Firefox on my site and therefore the people are not using Firefox are going to see the button. If the visitor is already using Firefox (and with ABP) then the ‘advertisement’ is pointless anyways. The only exception is where I am trying to ‘promote’ the newer version (Firefox 3.6) but I can do that in other ways that won’t be affected by ABP.

Remove List All Tabs Tweak Updated

The Moving/Removing List All Tabs Button tweak has been updated for Firefox 3.0 and newer. This includes instructions on how to remove the List All Tabs button in Firefox 3.0, 3.5 and 3.6.

Firefox 3.6 Released

Firefox 3.6 is now available for download via the getfirefox.com site. Please note at this time if you want Firefox 3.6 you will need to manually download and install this version. A Major Update (Firefox 3.5.X to 3.6.X) likely won’t be coming out until sometime after the Firefox 3.5.8 release in mid-February.

Note: It is recommend once you have downloaded Firefox 3.6 to remove Firefox 3.5 before installing. You may bring your current profile over from Firefox 3.5  to the new version.

Firefox 3.0 users Mozilla is going to ending support and updates after the 3.0.18 release in mid-February. Firefox 3.5 will continue to be updated for the next 6-months (or so) or until Firefox 3.7/4.0 is released later this year.

Need help tweaking Firefox 3.6? Be sure to check out the Firefox Extension Guru’s Wiki.

For more details about the new Firefox 3.6 features be sure to visit Mozilla Links.