49367 - Mozilla.org needs a sidebar server

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Public Pages, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Mozilla.org needs to set up a sidebar panel server so the Mozilla product can 
point somewhere besides Netscape.com to appease rabid anti-Netscape folks.

Not that I can imagine a nearly empty sidebar server being all that useful, but 
apparently simply not using the sidebar is not an option.

Comment 1

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

adding endico to this bug for her input.  I like this idea.  We could probably
get a few panels set up.  I suspect that mozillazine.org would let us mirror
their channel and m.o could have a sidebar panel.  I know there is a nice little
bugzilla sidebar panel that the dino project guys put together.

Comment 2

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Note that Mozilla.org wouldn't have to actually serve the panels, it just has 
to serve information about panels it knows about. It might be nice to have a 
lot of the linux/hacker oriented site panels available without suffering with 
the lame "My Netcenter" frame you get from the panels as served from the 
Netcenter server (Slashdot, HackerNewsNetwork, etc.)

Comment 3

[Mitchell Baker]

sounds like a good idea to me; Reassigning to Dawn

Comment 4

[Dawn Endico]

what exactly does a sidebar panel server need to provide?
It would be a index of sidebar panels? And sidebar panels 
are just rss files, right?

Would it make sense to get my.userland.com (or meerkat?)
to do this instead since they already do rss indexing.
http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/

Comment 5

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

IDEA: The sidebar server should also allow people to upload their own sidebar 
pages for use on their browser. Another thing is that the sidebar server would 
allow it to make the sidebar much faster since the server could have its 
connection and would not have to share it with netscape.com servers.

Comment 6

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

By the way, if it was implemented as indented options, it would be indented way 
too far.

Comment 7

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

Please ignore that last submission - it was meant for another bug.

Comment 8

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

Adding self.

Comment 9

[Brian 'netdragon' Bober]

OK, I just got a chained system of 400 computers, each with 5000 processors. 
Any takers?

Comment 10

[Mark Belanger]

While I agree the Mozilla needs it's own section for Sidebars, it's not because
I dislike Netscape.  Kudos, Netscape.  Thanks for Mozilla.  However, the problem
is that the current Sidebar section is a) woefully out of date and b) moderated
by people who don't appear to have the time or interest in maintaining it.  I
applied on dmoz.org to be an editor for the section only to get "The Netscape
section cannot be moderated by external users" in reply.  Fine, then at least
turn it over to someone who has the time to maintain it.

I believe the Sidebar is one of the more interesting components to Mozilla and
would like to see it thrive.  We've already built Flash-based MP3 player that
lets you listen to our internal MP3 collection while you surf around and plan to
build Sidebars for all our internal systems from CVS to LDAP.  I suspect others
are building interesting Sidebars, as well.
It seems like setting up an additional server for this is overkill.  Why not
just use dmoz and point mozilla to:

 Top: Computers: Software: Internet: Clients: WWW: Browsers: Mozilla: Sidebars

That seems like the simplest way to meet all the goals without introducing a ton
of work.  The hardest part is going to be coordinating with dmoz.org.  If you
folks like the idea, I'll even volunteer to edit it.

Comment 11

[Daniel Wang]

*** Bug 216166 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Brian King [:kinger]]

Dare I say this issue needs greater urgency, given that the default route for
getting sidebar panels is broken. See bug #214819.

It would be nice to break all dependencies on netscape here.

Comment 13

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Looks like there's an easy short-term fix for bug 214819: redirecting from dmoz
to the working netscape equivalent.

Comment 14

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

--> Server Operations Projects

Comment 15

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

This sounds like a natural extension to the addons site now that we have it, if we still need this.

Comment 16

[Mike Shaver (:shaver emeritus)]

WONTFIX; meaningless at this point.