Beer o’clock in Brighton begins shortly after work ends on a Friday evening. That’s when the geeks of Brighton unshackle themselves from their keyboards and monitors to congregate in a pub. If the weather is good, it’ll be a sunny pub. Last friday the Clearlefties descended on The Eagle where we were joined by Ribotians and others.
Glenn showed up and we proceeded to geek out on our usual favourite topics; microformats and data portability. He had spent the day hacking on a Firefox plug-in. If you haven’t tried his Identify extension, do yourself a favour and install it—it’s quite astounding.
I mentioned that I had tried to hack together my own Firefox extension for Huffduffer but was thwarted by my lack of skill in reverse-engineering and penetrating the documentation. I wanted to provide a fairly simple behaviour: right-click on a link to an audio file and select an option to huffduff it.
Two days later I got an email from Glenn with a file attached …a Firefox extension he built for huffduffing. Fantastic!
I hacked around with the JavaScript a little bit (adding a check to make sure the hyperlink being right-clicked was pointing to an audio file) and added Huffduffer icons from Paul’s icon set. Meanwhile Glenn added a little touch of genius; using Firefox’s built-in microformats parser to check for rel-tag values on the page and pre-fill the Huffduffer form with them.
Anyway, grab the Huffduffer Firefox plug-in for yourself and give it a whirl.
Next time it’s beer o’clock in Brighton, I owe Glenn a beer.