I set up a Planet Mozilla twitter feed a while back that does nothing more complicated than twitter every time a new post hits Planet. Having been following it for a while, I find that I have a more comprehensive and up-to-date ambient awareness of what’s going on around the project. Where I used to have to take the time to look at and read through a long list of feeds in my feed reader, I now just get quick infoblips through the twitter feed. I like it quite a bit, and it seems to be working well. You can follow it here, if you’re interested:

http://twitter.com/planetmozilla

For those of you who are as addicted to Twitter as I am, I’ve cobbled together an experimental Twitter feed that tweets every new item that appears in the Planet Mozilla web feed in (close to) real time.

Follow along @planetmozilla.

Ever miss an issue of the about:mozilla newsletter and find yourself cursing my name because you couldn’t find the archives? Curse no more! I finally dug around the Mailchimp knowledge base and figured out how to auto-generate a full list of every issue of about:mozilla ever published.

I’ve added the archives to the about:mozilla weblog, on their very own Newsletters archives page. The blog itself hasn’t been in use for quite some time, but I’m re-evaluating that now and there will likely be activity there again soon.

[05:50:32] <dria> i’m facing sunrise right in the _face_
[05:50:45] <dria> the question stands: make coffee, or hope to catch an hour of zzs?
[05:51:55] <phik> hah
[05:52:02] <phik> I just had my coworker shut the blinds
[05:52:07] <phik> because every night, the sunset blinds me
[05:52:17] <phik> THAT IS THE SAME SUN!

My friend phil lives on pretty much the opposite side of the planet. I talk to him a lot more (like daily) than I speak to most people who live in the same city. This is one of the reasons I really love the internet.

Update: I made coffee.

Every week, the about:mozilla newsletter is published in four formats — html email, plaintext email, web feed, and as a blog post (which also gets syndicated through Planet). This array of formats makes it difficult to gather any stats about how many people read the newsletter, where they’re from, so on and so forth. I know how many people subscribe to the email version, but that’s about it.

This post lives at the other end of a bit.ly link in the current newsletter which I’m hoping folks will click to help me gather some rough statistics about the newsletter’s readers.

If you’re here because you clicked the link, thank you! That’s all you need to do, and I appreciate you taking the time to help me out. If you have any other feedback about the newsletter, please leave a note in the comments here. Thanks!

The about:mozilla newsletter needs to evolve. It launched about 14 months ago and hasn’t changed at all in that time while the Mozilla project has continued to grow and expand. Based on the feedback I’ve received from a few people, I’m proposing that the newsletter morph from a “light and quick overview of a handful of interesting items” to a “full-blown newspaper for Mozilla project contributors”.

This is going to involve a lot more research and editorial work, and it could end up being longer, but it will have better structure and organization making it easier to skim and digest. As something targeted at project contributors, I think it will be more useful overall.

The following static sections were suggested:

Firefox
* Feature development, major changes, demos, etc.

Labs and add-ons
* Labs, labs projects, AMO, add-on news (Firebug, etc)

Other products and projects
* Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino, etc.

Upcoming releases
* Shortform list of all known/announced upcoming releases

Security notes
* Quicklist of recent security issues and information

Infrastructure and IT
* All project-infrastructure related news - upcoming planned outages, upgrades, changes, etc. Bugzilla, tinderbox, graphserver, etc.

Project coordination
* Upcoming bugdays, testdays, l10n events/deadlines, community marketing events, etc.

Events and conferences
* Devdays, barcamps, meetups, labs nights, Mozilla-involved conferences, etc. Bullet-pointy.

Meetings and meeting notes
* Standard reminder about the Community Calendar and all the goodness that resides there. Link to meeting notes blog + rss feed.

In the media
* Recent important media mentions or other PR-related things of interest

Mozilla
* MoCo/MoFo/MoMo related news. EC stuff, goals setting, education program, governance, awards, etc.

Etcetera/Miscellaneous
* Anything else that’s interesting enough to include.

What do you think? Good idea? Terrible idea? Do the proposed sections cover everything? Are there other things that would be useful in a weekly project newsletter? What else could/should be included?

I really want this newsletter to be as useful as possible for our project contributors, so your feedback is really important. Please leave your comments here or email me privately at deb-at-mozilla-dot-com. Thanks!

I’m trying to find a web-based discussion system that has the following features:

1) Web feeds
2) Email gateway for reading/replying
3) Threaded discussions

Partial points for two out of three.

The Mozilla Labs team is launching a grand experiment towards rethinking, redesigning, and redeploying the Labs website, and we need your help. All the details are over on the Labs weblog, and you can join the discussion in the Labs forums.

This is going to be a fun and crazy project, and everyone is welcome and encouraged to take part. We want to build something amazing, and we need your help figuring out what that is, what it looks like, and how it all fits together.

As the Mozilla project grows ever larger, it’s increasingly difficult to stay abreast of the latest news and goings-on throughout the community. A little over a year ago I started the about:mozilla newsletter in an attempt to make it slightly easier to get a general overview of the project, writing about releases, events, and announcements about Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Camino, the Foundation, the Corporation, Mozilla Messaging…etc., etc., etc.

The newsletter has been a pretty solid success, but it’s time to step things up a little, so I have three questions for you, dear reader:

More news than space

1) There are always more news-worthy stories than will fit in a single edition of the newsletter, and the number is increasing. Do you have any ideas about how I could cover more news without making the newsletter too long and unweildy?

Promotion and reach

2) How do you think I could better promote the newsletter? I’ve had comments recently that while useful, it just doesn’t seem to have the reach and impact that it could.

Overall quality

3) In general, what do you think of the about:mozilla newsletter? What do you think it does well? What do you think could be improved?

I’d really love to get your feedback on these things, or any other ideas or thoughts you have about the newsletter. Please leave a comment here or send me email at deb@mozilla.com. Thanks :)

I’m experimenting with different sorts of grains and just scored a bag of local organic quinoa from the Speerville Mill (local food + local business, woo). Invented this on the fly to go with a roasted chicken last night, and had leftovers for lunch today. It’s pretty tasty. Add more salt and/or vinegar if it seems too tame.

Ingredients

• 1/2 c wild rice (before cooking), cooked and cooled
• 1/2 c quinoa (before cooking), cooked and cooled
• 2 ribs celery, sliced thinly
• 1/3 bulb fennel, sliced thinly
• 3-4 scallions, sliced thinly
• 1 small shallot, minced
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• Juice from 1 lemon
• Splash of white wine vinegar
• 1/2 tsp honey
• 3-4 tbsp olive oil
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp fresh ground black pepper

Method
After cooking and letting the wild rice and quinoa cool, mix them together in a bowl. Add celery, fennel, and scallions, and mix.

Now put shallot, garlic, lemon juice, vinegar, honey, oil, salt and pepper in a jar and shake well to make a basic vinaigrette. Pour all of this over the stuff in the bowl, and mix well.

Ideally, you’ll make this a few hours in advance so the flavours can blend, but you can just serve it immediately if necessary. Leftovers keep well and taste even better the next day. x