See also:

• Development History
• How to build and release a new version of AddArt
• Version History

Roadmap

v.5 Self contained plugin – keeps images in the plugin, images are updated when the plugin is updated. The add-art site doesn’t automatically interact with the plugin. Changing the swapped images contained in the plugin happens manually. DONE

IMMEDIATE – get add-on working in Firefox 3

v1.0 Add-on updates images from a feed on the drupal site.

How it works

Add-Art works with AdBlockPlus

1. In artbanners.js our code makes a request for the AdBlockPlus object, then we parasite on it by substituting our function “shouldLoad” for ABP’s old “shouldLoad” function.
2. Our new function first calls the old ABP “shouldLoad”, which does the heavy lifting of finding out if an object is an ad or not.
3. If the object is an ad we then kick into our art substitution code.
   1. We generate a random number.
      • This happens once per object rather than once per page. Moving this to the page level is key to fixing Ticket [#22].
   2. We find images in our stuff that matches the dimensions of the object.
   3. We pick a random image from the best-dimension-matching images using the random number we picked earlier.
4. Code returns and firefox functions as normal.

Problems

1. The fixing of this bug could make it very difficult to replace images that have been blocked in Firefox 3

bug (now fixed): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=337246

feature request to re-add this functionality (please add your comments): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=384778

2. Rhizome Commission celebration is at the New Museum on May 22nd.

See ticket system

What we need to do

• get the plugin released on mozilla add-ons – AOM nomination text
• get the site ready for the public
• get xml file, parse it, and store images locally CODED

Greasemonkey code for harnessing Mozilla preferences

prefmanager.js

This would be useful for choosing a new artist on each page load, sequentially instead of randomly. Also it would be useful for keeping track of when you last checked the server for new images.

Helpful Links

• Building an Extension
• Setting up extension development environment

Useful Files

Extension building

Put this file in the main extension folder, and make sure that the name of the main folder is “extension-name”. It generates the extension with only one mouse click. http://www.tobi-x.com/temp/build.bat (win/pc)

Artbanners.js

\trunk\artbanners\components\artbanners.js

This is the file that provides the hook into ad block plus. We replace one of their hooks with one of ours. I suspect we may be able to grab a different page level hook on abp to roll the dice for a single gallery source per page.

addart.xml

\trunk\artbanners\chrome\content\addart.xml

Provides the current actual function to load one of our images instead of the ad image.

scripts.xml and script_wrapper.js

These provide hooks to replace text only ads like google ad-sense with pictures.

mistakes

• released on mozilla addons sandbox and didn’t know I could update. User base went up, then down.
• freaked out over the changes in FF3 and so far… there’s been no problems. (fingers crossed)
• ok that was wrong. FF3 was a problem. We should have put it on rent-a-coder sooner.
• Hired the wrong developers. 3 developers have tried to start the project but don’t get very far because of other jobs.
  • Too generous giving time to work without results. In the future, ask for some measurable amount of progress within 1 week. Anyone agreeing to work on the project should be able to accomplish something on it within that amount of time.
  • Didn’t look for developers outside network of friends. Friends have jobs and are more likely to say yes because they want to help, even though they may not have enough time.
• didn’t break tasks into easier to accomplish parts, such as “fix this script” or make this 1 improvement. Instead explained the whole project.
  • related with above, made a dumb mistake. Tried to accomplish the end result from the beginning instead of scaling up. For example, wanted first version of the plugin to load images from a server instead of starting smaller by having images load locally.