{"id":141,"date":"2009-01-07T14:09:15","date_gmt":"2009-01-07T22:09:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/webdev\/?p=141"},"modified":"2017-03-08T14:50:10","modified_gmt":"2017-03-08T22:50:10","slug":"enter-the-lizardfeeder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/webdev\/2009\/01\/07\/enter-the-lizardfeeder\/","title":{"rendered":"Enter the LizardFeeder"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

The Mozilla Tree<\/p>\n

(Be sure to check out
\nthe large version.)<\/small><\/div>\n

For the punchline first, go check out what just went live at feeds.mozilla.com<\/a>. The rest of this entry is the back-story.<\/p>\n

You see, behind Firefox is Mozilla, and behind Mozilla is a community. And the Mozilla community acts a lot like an ecosystem, which can be visualized as a kind of living tree<\/a>\u2014not to confused with the mozilla-central tree<\/a>. Oh yeah, and Mozilla is the name of both a Foundation and a Corporation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Confused yet? If not, then we should talk so you can explain it, because it all looks pretty tangly and intertwingled<\/a> to me. Nonetheless, it seems to work, and produces a good chunk of my favorite software and technologies.<\/p>\n

There are many efforts to track what\u2019s going on\u2014including planets<\/a> and newsletters<\/a> and bugzillas<\/a> and wikis<\/a> and repositories<\/a> and tinderboxen<\/a>. Some of these resources report on, or are driven by, the activity occurring in the others. Some are automated, and others are carefully stitched together by hand. None offer a full picture of what\u2019s going on in the Mozilla galaxy<\/a> in a way that\u2019s casually comprehensible by a sane human being.<\/p>\n

Of course, that\u2019s not a slight against any of these sites or the people maintaining them\u2014extracting an overview from such an organic phenomenon is neither easy nor straightforward. But, it might be fun to try.<\/p>\n

As an infovore and avid practitioner of continuous partial attention<\/a>, my first impulse is to reach for a firehose and stick my head into the stream. Relax, defocus, and try to let my pattern recognizers do their thing\u2014sometimes those pattern recognizers are in my head, and sometimes they\u2019re written in Python<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Firefox<\/a><\/p>\n

Firefox Victory!<\/p>\n

(Yes, I just wanted
\nto put a robot here.)<\/small><\/div>\n

But, for Mozilla, I couldn\u2019t find a stream of sufficient volume or completeness to satisfy me or my robots<\/a>. Happily, though, my feeding urge found itself aligned with a project to discover the patterns of contribution in the Mozilla community and to find a way to thank the contributors responsible.<\/p>\n

So, while we\u2019re still working on the thank-you angle, allow me to introduce you to the Lizardfeeder<\/a>. The LizardFeeder<\/a> is a feed aggregator, whose source code<\/a> is built atop Sam Ruby\u2019s Planet Venus<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The LizardFeeder<\/a> pulls together and archives activity streams from a wide variety of Mozilla community sources. Beyond the usual human-readable pages produced by a blog-gathering Planet<\/a>, the LizardFeeder<\/a> accumulates statistical and historical data<\/a> meant for consumption and analysis by robots.<\/p>\n

At present, the only robot navigating the LizardFeeder<\/a> archives is an AJAX-ified user interface that animates the firehose as a near real-time or time-lapsed stream of events scrolling by.<\/p>\n

This is just meant as a conversation starter, though. I\u2019m hoping to gather feedback and find more sources<\/a>, as well as to entice creative community members to come up with more sophisticated visualizations of this data.<\/p>\n

So, take a look, check it out<\/a>, and let us know what you think!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Mozilla Tree (Be sure to check out the large version.) For the punchline first, go check out what just went live at feeds.mozilla.com. The rest of this entry is the back-story. You see, behind Firefox is Mozilla, and behind … Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[288],"tags":[465,463,5,464],"coauthors":[],"yoast_head":"\nEnter the LizardFeeder - Mozilla Web Development<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/webdev\/2009\/01\/07\/enter-the-lizardfeeder\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"l.m. orchard\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/webdev\/2009\/01\/07\/enter-the-lizardfeeder\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/webdev\/2009\/01\/07\/enter-the-lizardfeeder\/\",\"name\":\"Enter the LizardFeeder - 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