Network Lighthouse

A couple of days ago I got a comment on one of my posts that struck me as unusual, it was marked as spam (thanks to akismet), but didn’t read like your standard spam. Here’s the text:

Good points raised here, (well, what I could read of it). I am afflicted with color blindness (tritanopia to be exact). I use Chrome browser (unsure if that matters), and a lot of your site is a little difficult for me to read. I don’t wish to whinge, and I know it is my problem really, nonetheless it would be cool if you could bear in mind color blind visitors when carrying out the next site re-working.

After a first glance I almost approved it without further thought, however something struck me as odd.   The comment linked to p_l_a_y_n_i_c_e .c_o .u_k, which backs up the post, still not convinced I did some googling and found a number of blogs with almost identically worded comments.   There was some differences in the wording, the browser changes, I’ve seen Chrome, Konqurer and Safari and there are a couple of different introductions.

The only thing I am sure of now is that this isn’t a legitimate comment, but is meant to serve some other purpose.   It may be just for self promotion, grandfathering links for search eangines, or potentially preparation for a drive by download attack.  I’ll keep track of the page and report any changes.

-Daniel

Well in between job interviews (I’m an Info Sec manager, based in Brisbane, AU, if anyone is hiring), I’ve been adding some new features and tidying up the code.  This release finally brings to life one of the most requested features, the ability to select a different image source for each contact.

Click (left mouse button) on a contact’s image and you’ll be presented with a dropdown list of the available image sources for that person.  Once you’ve selected a source you are happy with click outside the popup and it will disappear.

The change is displayed live as you make it, and is fixed to the source, not the image, so if someones twitter profile image is updated and that’s where you’re getting their profile picture from, you’ll see the new picture.  Which brings me slightly off-topic, SocialMail now garners profile image information from the tweet stream if twitter is being used, so the twitter image will always be fairly up-to-date and current.

As I mentioned above, only sites which are providing image url’s will show up in the drop down.  However if you want to add a profile image for a site, or (for example) add details about a niche social network, that RapLeaf or SocialMail haven’t discovered, then you can add those details to SocialMail so that they are always at hand.   This is done by the new “Manage Social Networks” popup, which can be access by clicking “[+]” next to the “Social Networks” heading.   This window allows users to manually setup and modify the social networks that are attached to a contact.   Caution is advised when using this view as it is important to get the urls correct otherwise things will not work as expected.

Other minor features that have been added in this release are:

• Integrating URLs from the addressbook, the same as was done with phone numbers in the last release
• If an alternate email address is added to a contact (in the SocialMail addressbook only) then when discovery is next run for them, both email addresses will be searched
• The number of twitter followers/followees(?) for a contact is now displayed at the bottom of the twitter tab, as is a button that allows you to follow them if you are not already.
• The ability to “reply” to tweets.

I think thats it, so here it is SocialMail v0.2.5 (right click, Save as).   I’ll post this to AMO in a few days if no-one reports any major issues.

Don’t think that because we are a quater of the way to 1.0, I am a quater of the way through the project, not by a long shot. but now that SocialMail’s framework is stabilising I can begin focussing on more integration pieces, next on my plan is OpenSocial integration, since a common API should mean I can add several sites without to much additional work.

And finally, Larry over at LEHSYS.COM has put together another video clip showing off SocialMail and some of the new features, many thanks Larry.  Check it out:  SocialMail on YouTube

It’s been a few weeks since SocialMail 0.13 was released and I’ve been busy in the mean time.   If you’ve read my last few posts you’ll know that the interface as been redone to allow a lot more information to be displayed while keeping the most recent details up front.

The interface has been converted to a tab based layout which allows us to have different screen areas for each information source, while allowing the front tab, to show the latest details from each section (user configurable).

SocialMail v0.2 also includes the first cut of twitter functionality, which once enabled adds a new tab which show the last 10 or so (configurable) tweets from whoever you’re viewing.   Users can now ‘tweet’ directly from Thunderbird with the new ‘Update Status’ functionality which will ultimately allow sending updates to multiple micro-blogging sites (twitter, myspace, facebook, linkedin, etc) as modules for those sites are added.

All  in all, a lot has gone into this SocialMail update, which is why it’s taken longer than anticipated, so I hope you all enjoy it and look forward to hearing your experiences with it.

So here it is: SocialMailv0.2.1

(NOTE: This is a small update to address 2 isssues raised by Larry)

Have Fun,

Daniel

It’s been a while since I’ve last posted an update on SocialMail so I figure it time to let everyone know what I’ve been working on.

One of the issues with the current release is that there is to much information to fit in the sidepanel.  If you have a contact that has data in each of the boxes then it forces the thunderbird window to expand, in my case (and I’m sure many others) this means off the end of the screen.    This issue is set to become much worse as I add functionality and new datasources.  To resolve this the interfaces has been reworked to use tabs to seperate the key parts, while keeping the most recent information on the first tab for easy access/reference.

Switching to a tab based layout has made things a lot clearer and will help with the integration of new data sources,  each of which can now have it’s own space to render as it needs.   Extra elements can be added as modules, without have to mess with the main code, so it will be theoretically possible for others to write SocialMail modules to extend it with specific extensions (much like SocialMail extends Thunderbird).

Twitter integration is now also well underway, with tweets being automatically displayed when you view an email from a contact who uses twitter.   Functionality to be able to post (re)tweets/direct messages/etc isn’t in yet, but thanks to the guys who wrote twitterHelper.jsm, shouldn’t take to long.

One last thing, for anyone familiar with the workings of XUL.   When I have a listbox which has the listcell-iconic style applied to it’s listitems, they aren’t selectable.  Why is that and how do I fix it?

Update: In answer to my own question, the issue is because I should have been using a listitem-iconic style not listcell-iconic.  The listcell styles don’t support selection since you typically want to select the whole item not just one cell.

-Daniel

A few people have reported having problems with SocialMail  on Linux, specifically Ubuntu has been reported but I’m sure it’s a consistent problem accross distributions and a few other operating systems.

Investigation identified that the issue was related to windows tolerating differences in the capitalisation of filenames.  I really should have caught this initially, but I’m presently without a linux desktop to test things out on, so my apologies to all the Linux users out there.

All said and done, here is a new version which fixes the issue: socialMail-v013

-Daniel