Reviews on AMO
My last post keeps getting comments, and I’m seeing this brought up on the amo-editors mailing list a lot. Add-on authors have two big questions:
- How do I get reviews for my add-on?
- Do external reviews count?
These are both very good questions, but sadly, I haven’t seen a really good answer to either yet.
How do I get reviews for my add-on?
All you have to do is get people to post reviews to your add-on in the sandbox. Yes, there is a slight barrier to entry with this process since AMO requires users to first sign up and then enable the sandbox before they can even post a review. This process is still being smoothed out by the AMO developers (last I knew), so things may get a bit easier. One of the editors has written up a wiki page with directions on how to post a review that you can link your users to.
There are a number of ways in which you can obtain reviews for your add-on. If you extension is site-specify, post on that site about it, and get the users interested in it. If it targets a specific group, perhaps you should reach out to that group through a mailing list or forum. Blogging is quite popular these days, so blog about your add-on; get your friends to blog about it! Perhaps we should start a wiki page and let add-on authors share how they are getting the word out about their add-on.
Do external reviews count?
They certainly can in my book! The catch is that editors are not likely to go out looking for them, so you should absolutely provide URLs to them in your notes to the review section when nominating your add-on for public status. If you don’t provide links, you should expect that we won’t find them.
I hope this clears things up a bit. If you have any questions, feel free to mail the editors list (amo-editors at mozilla dot org) or post comments here.
Neat Bugzilla Feature
Did you know you can mark bugzilla comments, making them appear to be highlighted? timeless recently pointed this out on irc, and I figured a lot of people didn’t know about this really neat feature. All you have to do is add &mark={comments} to the query string of the url, and can you can highlight away! The comments can be specified in a comma separated list, and/or you can specify ranges.
I’ve marked up my first fixed bug as an example.
SQLite in and back out
I landed the upgrade to SQLite today to get us up to version 3.3.17. The version in trunk is horribly old, so we really need this upgrade. Sadly, Windows didn’t like it and the patch is now backed out again :(
Hopefully I’ll get a patch tomorrow that doesn’t hang on shutdown. Now, I’m off to go play in the land of multi-threaded code – hurray!
California
Hey, hi there. Its been a while since I wrote here. It’s funny how every time I mean to start writing on a regular basis, I quickly fail miserably at it.
I have to say, California really isn’t all that bad. I mean, sure, traffic sucks a lot, and the roads are confusing as hell, but there are a lot of nice things. For starters, it doesn’t usually get to hot (with the exception of this week, sadly). It’s generally around 85 degrees during the day, and very little humidity. Compared to Michigan and its hot and humid summer (complete with random thunderstorms!), it rocks. There’s almost never a cloud in the sky, and I don’t think it has rained since I got out here (which was over a month ago!). I suppose that’s like a drought now that I think about it…
The weather does seem to be a bit odd at times, however. The mornings are much colder that the day, which I suppose is to be expected with little to no cloud cover. I probably wouldn’t mind so much if I wasn’t waking up at 6 AM fairly often to go running. There’s a lovely trail that is ridiculously close to our apartment that I’ve been running on. I hit water Tuesday when I ran, and I’m told that that is the tip of the bay. I thought that was pretty cool considering how rare it is to see large bodies of water out here (my perspective is, of course, skewed because I am from Michigan).
To sum it all up – it’s nice out here. I don’t mind it one bit.
More Download Manager Changes
Two more download manager back-end changes landed recently. First, Bug 382825 added a potentially useful method:
void retryDownload(in unsigned long aID);
This will retry a download with the specified id, and fails if it cannot find the download in the database or if the download is currently in progress.
Then Bug 382839 landed, which enables getDownload to return both active downloads and any download that is in the database. Extension authors will not have to directly query the database to get the information they need about the download.
I think this is probably about it for back-end changes for Firefox 3. Still fixing a few random regressions that have popped up, and an interesting leak was found, but otherwise, it is about time to move onto the UI overhaul!