Introduction
QuietUrl is a firefox extension that makes all url-related tasks less painful, more intuitive and stress-free.
Main features are: automatic obfuscated or mismatched url translation, automatic url obfuscation and smooth automatic anchor creation on textual url hovering.
The project was started mainly to somehow get rid of the hassle of obfuscated and/or mismatched links found often in forums, blogs and boards in general. Then I extended the project's goal to the more general idea of making hyperlinking experience less stressful and smoother.
Screenshots
Website
In the next paragraphs I'm going to explain the main reasons behind the choice to create a whole website just for a single extension. The reasons that made me create the website and the reasons I constructed it this way. Also some notes on the contents I used to build it up.
Why This Website
Ok, now I've made this extension and uploaded it to the mozilla.org addons website, it's all just there and working, so where does the need to put on a specific website for the "project" come from?
Well, the first thing to note is when this project started, that is in july of 2007, when I first programmed the add-on and sent it to AMO, mozilla's repository for their products' extensions. The second thing to note is when instead the add-on came to the public view: january of 2008. The reason for this huge delay is that when you upload an extension to AMO, it is not published immediately but goes through a review process which is absolutely OK in my opinion, it's meant to avoid crap, I totally agree. The problem is how the whole process is maintaned and managed.
The idea of review they have is quite ridiculous, just some line of text sent by some anonymous guy. The ridiculous part is that most of the times you just need to be selfish, egocentric and lame enough to create an account on AMO and write some review yourself to your own add-on, and/or ask some friends of yours to do the same. This of course does not give to the downloader any insurance on the trustworthiness of the code he's just donwloading.
The interesting thing is that when instead you send a new version of your just published extension, the review responsability is taken by a mozilla editor who tests your code prior to making it publicly available. So why not to do the same thing for new extensions coming out? New versions of existing extensions are of course a way more frequent submissions than completely new extensions and so it should not prejudice the entire system.
Well, telling the truth, the system is already screwed up. In fact even updating your extension to a newer version is a very painful and frustrating experience because the process is anything but fast: having your extension's shiny new version publicly available can require up to 1-2 weeks. And if yours is a security extension? 1-2 weeks of possibly worldwide vulnerability without any chance of somehow automatically informing the users of your software.
So, basically the latter is the main reason of existance of this website, just a place to keep new versions of the extension while I'm wating for them to appear on the AMO website. Just like that.
Why This Way
"Ok, now we know why this website was born, but why making it this way?"
If this question popped in your mind, why the hell a website for a so simple thing should ever be this pompous and self-important, well just because is a simple thing it can be like that.
In fact the main disadvantage of a website like this is loss of readability but if the purpose for its existance is just to provide a place in which you can put some files to download and nothing more, there are no real accessibility/readability needs, simply because your website won't be read or accessed that much.
The second reason to make it this way is again related to the kind of content it will host. In fact, as I said, this is just a place where I can keep most updated versions of my firefox extension (QuietUrl, as you can easily guess). This means that there are no real contents a non-firefox user can ever be interested in. So I was wondering "Why to drive myself mad with cross-browsers compatibility, when all of this stuff will be of some use just for a specific browser?". Just after that thought I chose to limit the compatibility with other browsers to the simple "it works" and to ignore superfluous issues like "that image is not perfectly aligned the same way in all browsers", like generally web designers are forced to.
This new perspective made me go even further and decide not only to somehow ignore browsers other than firefox, but also to build a website that would have taken full advantage of the firefox's rendering capabilities offered by the Gecko Engine upon which firefox itself is based, and so I did. If you're reading this in firefox and don't get what I mean, try to look at this same page in Internet Explorer 7 and you'll understand what I'm talking about. In IE7 is essentially impossible to browse this website in an usable way and even IE6 has some problems (apart of course from the 24bit png files which as you probably know are not supported by the browser). Speaking sincerely even Opera (version 9.26) has some responsiveness problems for what concerns the sidebar here on the left. Generally speaking (as a webdesigner) these rendering malfunctions would have been seen as a "bad thing", in this specific case instead are a good way to underline various browesers' capabilities and limits.
Website Contents
The contents of this website are completely created, constructed and written by me. The only exceptions are some images used as icons in the Sidebar here on the left and as images near titles in the various pages of the website itself. Those are all taken from some of the impressive hi-def icon sets offered by http://www.vistaicons.com/, particulary the Aero Pack and Toolbar Pack. You can find both of them on the same website I just linked above.
