Coder, Gamer, Runner, Husband.
Since its birth a few years ago, my Firefox addon BetterSearch has been a fun project. People were using it and seemed mostly happy with it, as they could see a thumbnail of the search results on their favourite search engine before actually clicking through. Good times.
This was made possible by displaying preview thumbnails from various sources, such as Amazon’s Alexa service and several others. These thumbnails had to be bought from them, which was financed by money I made as an Amazon affiliate. When BetterSearch would find an Amazon product in the list of search results, it would not display the Amazon.com thumbnail but the actual product image, along with the price, average rating and related information. When a user would click through, and buy stuff from them, I (as their affiliate) would get a few cents.1
This worked out well. It paid for server, bandwidth and thumbnails, and yes, I’ve made some extra money from it. Not much, but a bit.
Then, around end of 2008, Amazon changed the terms of their affiliate program — all of a sudden, what BetterSearch (and several other addons for different browsers) were doing wasn’t allowed anymore. No more tagging of so-called “organic search results”. Oh noes! The Amazon partner program-related code had to go.
This put me in a somewhat tough spot. On the one hand, I liked my addon, and I know a lot of people were using it on a daily basis. On the other hand, it was just a side project, and the only source of income to counter the costs had suddenly dried up — and to be honest, as much as I like BetterSearch, it’s nothing I was willing or able to invest lots of money in just for the fun of it.
But luckily, the company of a former co-worker of mine was looking for something like BetterSearch. They were interested in buying the addon, and we came to an agreement.
It means BetterSearch, the Firefox addon, is now owned by Abakus Internet Marketing. They will continue to develop it, they will run its servers, pay for the bandwidth and the thumbnails — in a nutshell, everything BetterSearch is theirs now.
For the end user, not much will change — apart from a vastly expanded number of available thumbnails, that is. Firefox will update the addon whenever there’s a new version, the way it was before. No need to manually install or adjust anything.
No user-related data was passed along. First and foremost, BetterSearch didn’t collect any user data. But of course there’s always the case of the thumbnail server logfiles. Everytime a thumbnail is requested, it’s noted in a server logfile, along with the user’s IP address. (That’s the modus operandi for pretty much every server everywhere on the internet. Ask your local geek about the details.) Since I don’t care about this stuff, these logfiles were deleted on a daily basis anyone looking at them.
Either way, these server log files were not part of the deal.
I think the addon’s future is a bit brighter now as it was a few months ago. Now there’s someone with sufficient resources to maintain and further develop BetterSearch. To me, that’s a good thing. :)
Some people think it is “amoral” to tag Amazon links in such a way, and claimed it was sneaky. I disagree with both points. For me, it added meaning and context to the Amazon search results. And the information that this was done was disclosed on the addon’s website, it’s AMO page and in the addon’s preferences dialog. Everybody using the addon decided to use it. Free will and all that. So there. ↩
I’ve updated BetterSearch, my Firefox/Flock addon, to version 1.21. Here’s what’s new:
Go get the new version while it’s still hot! :)
Brings no new features to the table (sorry) but compatibility with Firefox 3.0.* and Flock 1.2.
I’ve updated my Firefox addon BetterSearch to version 1.19. The update brings Firefox 3 and Flock compatibility and fixes the thumbnails for Yahoo! Search. Also, it now looks a little bit better due to new icons, c/o FamFamFam.
You remember BetterSearch, right? No? Oh, okay.
“An extension for Firefox and Flock which enhances Google (all international flavours, too), Yahoo Search, del.icio.us, MSN Search […] by adding previews (thumbnails) and Amazon product images and info (type, price, rating for US/DE/UK/CA/FR products), a quick preview feature as well as “Open in New Window”, “Site Info” and “Wayback Machine” links to the search results.”
The other changes are minor and mostly under the hood to prepare for the next major version.
Next up: better thumbnails. Work, work…
Technorati WTF. Technorati launches their WTFsystem. I see the possibility of serious abuse, but we’ll see whether I am too paranoid. Anyways, the short summary:
Know something that’s hot? Explain why! This is your opportunity to write a quick explanation for the buzz around a popular subject. No blog required!
getElementsByClassName() in Firefox 3. Native, built-in! Because John said so.
Get your URLs straight. A good explanation why everyone should be using disambiguated URLs by (of course) Mr. Willison. (Now all I need to do is “fix” my site.)
Presently. Apparently Google is working on a presentation tool. Is anyone really surprised? I ain’t. For the time being, I’ll stick with S5, tho. But I believe Google will be taking a slightly different approach than the creator of S5, i.e. they’ll continue catering to non-geeks.
The aforementioned tech article is available now on YUIblog.com! It’s explaining a way to use the excellent YUI library in Greasemonkey scripts. I’m sure that this approach is neither the perfect nor the only solution to achieving YUI/Greasemonkey integration, but it works for me and I thought sharing can’t hurt.
Well, the article is here, and the example script can be downloaded from this very site here.
Many thanks to Eric Miraglia for giving me a soapbox. :)
If you have comments and suggestions about the implementation, feel free to post a comment to the actual article.
That Greasemonkey article I was talking about a few days ago is coming along nicely.
We’re in the middle of polishing, and if all goes well, it’ll be posted within the next 72 hours.
Always exciting. :)
A few weeks ago I was minding my own business at work, writing a Greasemonkey script to solve a problem I had, when I noticed that apparently I had found the solution for a GM problem that not only I had but a number of other people as well. So, I tinkered and tinkered and tinkered some more and discovered that I had managed to write something fairly wicked that I had never seen before.
Now, when it comes to my own code, I always tend to be somewhat cautious about getting too excited about it. I myself might find it pretty cool and elegant, but I always have the nagging feeling that I might have overlooked some glaring problem or messed up otherwise. (Interestingly enough this behaviour surfaced around the time I started working at Yahoo!. Heh. That’s what happens when you know there are real top dogs around. Honestly, we pack some serious talent around the world, which can feel a bit frightening at times.)
Anyways, I finished it up and posted it on one of our internal mailing lists, and after getting back some very encouraging comments I decided to show it to Eric, one of our major Javascript famosos.
Turns out he found it interesting enough to ask me whether I want to write an article for one of our public dev blogs. Holy crap.
So yesterday I finished a working example, and today I’ve submitted my article. When all goes well, and after some (hopefully) serious proof-reading (to make sure I don’t make a fool out of myself after all), it will be presented to the interwebs.
Now, I don’t want to tell you where or what, mostly because I am getting increasingly paranoid about bragging. But quite frankly, I am amazed I made it this far, and even if it isn’t published after all, at least it was considered interesting enough to let me take a shot there.
And for me, that is quite something.
…ist raus. Exzellentes Addon für Firefox, das jedem ans Herz gelegt sei, der Webseiten entwickelt oder Javascript schreibt.
Persönliches neues Lieblingsfeature nach zwei Stunden seit Installation: das Network Monitoring—sehr praktisch!
Das war mir doch auch gleich eine Spende an Joe Hewitt, den Entwickler, wert. Die hat er sich mittlerweile redlich verdient. :)
