Mozillians.org, our community directory, is a great way for core Mozilla contributors to find and contact each other. Several Mozillians have asked for an option to share their profiles with others, and you can now display your Mozillians.org profile publicly by using the new privacy controls.

If you have a Mozillians.org account, your profile is still visible to only Mozillians. To make you profile public, go to Edit Your Profile, mark at least one field as Public, and click the Update button. Then you will have a publicly viewable profile showing all the information you have set as public. If you want your profile to remain visible to only Mozillians, you do not need to make any changes.

You can now change the visibility for each profile field when editing your profile.

Who can see your profile? View your profile and select the different groups — Public, Mozillians, or Myself — to see what information is visible to each group. For now, the information displayed when viewing your profiles as a Mozillian or Myself is the same.

Quickly check who can see your profile information with the ‘View as’ dropdown menu.

If you have at least one profile field marked as public, you will have a publicly viewable profile showing all the information you have set as public.

Making your profile public lets the world know that you’re a Mozillian. It makes your association with Mozilla discoverable on search engines, and it lets you share a link to your profile with people who aren’t Mozillians. I encourage you to make at least part of your profile public. It is a great way to share your profile with family and friends. Also, making your name, website and IRC username public allows others to easily contact you. Here’s my profile for example.

Mozillians do amazing things every day, and having public profiles allows information about individuals to be easily discovered. We’ll soon be adding badges and new fields to profiles, so you’ll be able to better connect and learn about other Mozillians. To follow along or participate in our plans, take a look at our project wiki and discussion forum.

I would love your help in finding some of these fun facts to add to our homepage. Go to mozillians.org, see what neat things you can find, and then add those facts to this etherpad of fun Mozillians facts.

Did you know that…

We are Mozilla. AUA.

If you’re not familiar with reddit IAmA/AMA, it stands for “I am a (Mozilla contributor), ask me anything” that allows the reddit community to pose questions to prominent people or groups. This has become a popular engagement outlet – President Obama participated in an IAmA last month, and Mozillians have conducted IAmAs in the past:

• IAmA Significant Portion of the Firefox for Android Development Team. AUA
• [IAmA] We’re on the Firefox development team, and yesterday we shipped the Firefox 4 Release Candidate.
• IAmA member of the Mozilla Webdev Team, AMA

[un-t.co] Someone needs to make isthe24thStMissionBARTescalatorworking dot com into a single serving web site. missionmission.org/2012/07/24/bar…

— burritojustice (@burritojustice) July 25, 2012

I love single serving sites. And I’ve recently been amused at the number of broken escalators at BART stations. After seeing burritojustice’s tweet, I quickly forked Is there a Giants game today? to let BART travelers know about their how their favorite escalator is doing.

Introducing isthe24thstmissionbartescalatorworking.com

Have an idea? Submit a pull request on GitHub.

The Mozilla Firefox page on Facebook recently passed 10 million fans. That’s a lot of friends, hugs and high-fives!

How does that compare to other brands? That’s more than Hello Kitty, Nike and Taco Bell. It’s also more than Google, and very close to Google Chrome.

We use our Facebook page to develop genuine relationships with Firefox users. It’s a place for us to tell our story, share exciting news, help users and even feature some of our fans. For many Firefox users this is the main way they interact with Mozilla regularly.

Our fans and content are truly global too. While other organizations post content in only English, we publish our posts each week in several languages thanks to our team of over a dozen contributors.

Our Facebook page continues to grow quickly, and I’m looking forward to the next millions of Firefox fans. They’re part of our community and they support Mozilla’s mission to make the Web better. Thank you to all of our fans – you are the ones who really make our Facebook page special.

Where will we find the millions of Firefox users in Latin America? Photo by Ricardo Pontes

At MozCamp the other week, Winston Bowden and I hosted a workshop for improving our user engagement programs in Latin America. There are already millions of Firefox users in that area, but there is potential for many millions more to discover and use Firefox.

As a group we brainstormed ways to talk to new users and reach them. Chelsea Novak will then help put together a regional toolkit for Latin America. Such a toolkit will provide the information and resources to reach people and tell them about Firefox. And we’ll be sharing the initial toolkit in the coming weeks.

Many ideas for finding new Firefox users

The 25 Mozillians in our workshop had lots of ideas. A full list of responses and ideas are in this etherpad. We also discussed important Latin American events for our content calendar and ways to adapt our social media strategy for the region.

If you’re interested in contributing to the regional toolkit or just giving feedback, send a note to the user engagement mailing list.

How do you think we can reach new Firefox users in Latin America? Leave a comment below.

Today is an important day for Bay Area residents. It’s the Giants’ first home game of the season. With the season in full swing, there’s a question on everybody’s mind each day: Is there a Giants game today?

Fans want to know. Anyone taking public transit definitely wants to know.

So my friend and I created a simple app: Is there a Giants game today?

First home game of the season

It’s our first website side project, and it was fun to create. Check out Laura’s post for the background story. I’ll cover the technical aspects and what we learned.

We worked on it bit by bit, starting with static content and then added the ability for the site to update each day with game information. The code is on GitHub too – fork it and play with it.

What we learned

Keep it simple. Content is minimal. We just answer the question and provide information about today’s game or the next game. No fancy graphics, design or features.

It’s okay to start with a base. There are several Mozilla sites similar to ours that answer a simple question: Are we fast/mobile/pretty/slim/small/first yet? We used their layout and code as a base to get our page working as quickly as possible.

JSON for data storage. Instead of storing the Giants’ schedule in a database, we placed it in a JSON file. This allows all logic to be handled client-side and should make it easier to add offline support later.

JavaScript and jQuery for basic functionality. The page uses jQuery to access the schedule and fill in the content after the page loads. We also learned how to manipulate JavaScript Date objects to find the appropriate game information and format the date for upcoming games.

What’s next?

Improved layout across devices. We’re planning to use LESS so that the page will adapt to various screen sizes. Right now the page looks okay on different devices, but it should be easy to make it even better.

Offline support. Since people don’t always have a data connection on the go, we should make the app work offline too.

hCalendar support. We can use the hCalendar microformat to allow users to always have the next Giants in their favorite calendar app.

Have an idea for making the site better? Submit a pull request or leave a comment.

stickers, swag, rockets!

The other week I joined a number of Mozillians and web makers for a Hack Day in New York City. What’s a Hack Day?

The intention is to host a day of talks, hacks and demos that first introduces the participants to Mozilla and our various open web projects, then invite attendees to shift into participant mode and start hacking.

Sounds fun, right? A day of learning and hacking with others who like like to make things on the web.

My Hack Day experience

I was delighted to participate while visiting New York. As a hobbyist web maker, I found the talks and collaborative hacking very helpful. While there’s lots of great documentation for web developers, nothing beats talking to people and sharing ideas. I’m currently working on a simple web app for people in the Bay Area, and I was able to get advice from experts on some implementation challenges I’d hit with offline support. Plus, there was time at the end of the Hack Day to see what everyone created and get to know each other better.

What’s next?

This was the first ever MDN Hack Day, and there are several more being planned for later this year. The next one will be in Buenos Aires on April 20, and you should participate if you are in the area (it’s free!). Future Hack Days will be announced on Mozilla Hacks.

This year I’m going, and I’m ecstatic about my first SXSW Interactive. After digesting the massive schedule and reading several guides (my favorite is Brad King’s Nerdpocalypse guide), I have a basic plan. My goal is to meet lots of people and get ideas for making Firefox social media even better. There are a few talks and events I definitely want to attend, and the rest I’ll figure out as I go (mind like water).

Are you going to SXSW? @dailycavalier me on Twitter and let’s meet up.

SXSW veterans, what are your tips for surviving?

For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important. -Gary Whitman

The Two Things about Mozilla

1. Create products (such as Firefox, Marketplace, Persona, B2G) that disrupt controlled platforms in order to build a better Web
2. Develop projects in an open way that allows contributors from all over the world to participate and work towards the mission of keeping the power of the Web in people’s hands [from About Mozilla]

The Two Things about Engagement

1. Create authentic relationships with all stakeholders
2. Each type of stakeholder has different needs

The Two Things about User Engagement

1. Develop genuine relationships with users that provide 2-way value
2. Surprise and delight users often

The Two Things about Social Media

1. Share your story with fans – they’re listening
2. Listen to users and support them – they have stories to share too and need your help sometimes

What do you think are The Two Things about Mozilla? What are The Two Things about areas where you contribute?