Read It Later’s Future

I wanted to brief everyone on what my plans are for the Read It Later extension as it’s now been two months since the last update. I’ve been ignoring you while I was working on Tail Report. Tail Report is happily cranking away so now it’s time for Read It Later again. The next update (0.9) will only be for Firefox 3. The bookmarking service built into Firefox has been completely revamped between FF 2 and 3. It’s great because they finally have a solid bookmark API that will make the Read It Later extension much more stable. Before I literally had to pour through thousands of lines of the Firefox source code to figure out how to make it do the simplest tasks. But this also means that Read It Later will have to be rebuilt to work on Firefox 3. This gives me the opportunity to make some decisions about which features will carry over, which won’t, and what new features will be added.

So I’m asking you dudes and dudines for two things:

1. Suggestions - If you have any suggestions on features you wish it had, now is the time to voice them. If you see a suggestion from someone in the comments and you like it, second it. 2. What You Like Now - In addition to telling me what you want, tell me what you like about it the way it is now. I want to know what features people are using.

One more thing:

I also wanted to gauge how you feel about the current method of storing/retrieving your list. Are you happy with the way it is working now? Do you prefer having the list stored locally on your computer or would you like a way to access it online? I originally tried to keep things simple without requiring you to sign up for another service but perhaps you are interested in having your list hosted with an RSS feed.

Timeline

The timeline for this new release hasn’t been decided upon yet. I’m still waiting to see how things are shaping up with the official release of Firefox 3 out of Beta. But I promise you this update is coming and hopefully soon.

Comment to Email - Wordpress Plugin

The Comment to Email Wordpress Plugin allows you to reply to a comment and have your response be sent simultaneously to the commenter via email and posted as a regular comment in your comment section, killing two birds with one stone. As some of you have probably noticed, I like to try to email commenters personally. The main reason I do this is because I assume that the commenter is not going to be checking back routinely to see if I posted a response. The only problem with emailing a response is that it takes the conversation away from your comment section, meaning anyone else who has the same problem or question will miss the answer. Because of this I would find myself copying and pasting my emails back into the comments, which is just tedious. So I decided to create a better solution.

How it Works

It’s quite simple. After installing the plugin:
  1. Under the Comments menu select ‘Reply to Comments’.
  2. Click ‘Reply’ on the comment you wish to reply to.
  3. Enter your message with WYSIWYG editor.
  4. Click Send.
  5. An email is sent to the commenter and your email is posted as a comment.
Additionally you have the option to BCC yourself on the message so you can get a copy to put into your sent items in your email program.

Features In the Works

As I said, I just quickly whipped this up today and I’m working on another idea at the time being, so I couldn’t do everything I wanted yet. Here’s what I’m hoping to add to it in the near future:
  • Ability to provide independent footers for the email and for the comment. This will allow you to say “I’m going to post this email in the comments so that others can see our discussion” to the email, but not have it appear in the actual comment.
  • Adding a flag in the subject line of the BCC email so that you can setup a message filter in Outlook, Thunderbird, etc to automatically have the BCC’d email drop into your sent items. This way it will be as if you sent it from your own email like normal.
  • What else can you think of?

Install/Configuration

  1. Download the plugin
  2. Upload the plugin to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory
  3. Under the ‘Plugins’ menu in your WP Admin, click ‘activate’ next to the plugin.
  4. Note: The email that messages are sent as (and bcc’d to) is the email address in your user profile in Wordpress. You can change this under the ‘Users’ menu.

Download

Test it out and if you run into any problems, drop me a note in the comments. Download - Version 0.4 (Requires Wordpress 2.5+) Download - Version 0.2 (For Wordpress 2.0 - 2.3)