For the past month or so I’ve been quietly putting together the basics of a Firefox extension for Plazes.net. I needed to learn a fair bit before I could even start: XUL, how Firefox extensions work, and then how to wire up a MAC-address-grabbing shell script to an extension (which is where the “auto-Plazing” magic happens).
The result, or rather the work in progress, is FirePlazer, which I’ve just released the source for. It’s primitive, only works under Mac OS X (and maybe some flavours of Linux) and needs some UI work, but it does most of what you’d want a Plazer to do for you: auto-Plazing by MAC address, Plaze lookup by keyword, and the ability to create presences in the past, present and future.
Here’s a short video demo of FirePlazer in action:
FirePlazer is a source-only release right now. The FirePlazer wiki page has instructions for how you can manually install the extension if you want to take it for a ride.
I’m releasing FirePlazer mostly as a proof-of-concept, with hopes that others will contribute enhancements to its functionality and UI, and use some of the underlying ideas to develop additional Plazes tools for Firefox.
About This Blog
I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
To learn more about me, read my /now, look at my bio, listen to audio I’ve posted, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way).
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of posts, an RSS feed of comments, or a podcast RSS feed that just contains audio posts. You can also receive a daily digests of posts by email.
Add new comment