I’m Back

(Originally posted 2005-11-11.)

One of the cardinal rules for a successful blog has been to write often. Clearly I’ve not done that for some time. Indeed I missed writing about zSeries Expo in San Francisco in September. And all I can say is that you really wouldn’t want to know about the internals of writing a Firefox extension, would you?

Well, maybe you would. 🙂

But it was (and is) a set of such small steps that reading about them here would be like watching paint dry.

So I subjected my IBM internal blog readership to that. 🙂

Seriously, the design work was incremental and required my internal users to be involved every step of the way. Hopefully, as a result, they got what they wanted – and I got the advice I needed.

I made the design decision to only support Firefox 1.5 and later. An informal poll 2 days ago (admittedly of a self-selecting group of IBMers who are committed to blogging and Firefox big-time) suggested that about 60% of Firefox users were already on 1.5 and so could use my extension. In the wild I expect the proportion would be smaller. But still those numbers vindicate my decision. And in 3 months time I expect almost nobody to still be on 1.0.x.