Furjournal Extension Aid

Basics

You may wish to view the License and Credits document before perusing this helpfile.

The Furjournal Extension's purpose is to meld the Member's Zone of Furjournal with Firefox on as an intuitive a level as possible, yet it does a little more than that, too. Here are the features available:

It can remember your name and take your to your journal or your friends page with that knowledge. This is covered below in the View my Journal section.
It can log you in to any relevant page on the Furjournal site automatically. This is covered in the Options section.
Clicking the icon or pressing Alt+J will take you to the "Add and Entry" page, here you can submit new entries to your journal.
There is a submenu under Tools called Furjournal, this has one-click access to all the pages found in Furjournal's Member's Zone and a few other relevant links from around the site.
It can check and tell you when you have new replies, comments and/or activity in your watch-list and then open the items appropriately.
Right-clicking on the icon brings up the same menu as Tools, then Furjournal would. This has the same one-click access for easily reaching the section of Furjournal you wish to visit.

There's nothing else to know. I hope you enjoy it!

View my Journal

Clicking on View my Journal for the first time results in a dialog which asks you what your name is. There is no danger in revealing it but you must enter the correct response. That would be your Furjournal username. For example, if the URL to your Furjournal page is http://www.furjournal.furtopia.org/users/Foobar then you would enter Foobar into the text field and click Remember. Every time you use View my Journal after that, it will take you straight to your journal. You will only ever need to do this once unless you change your account name. At that time, you should change your name again in the options.

Options

This can be a bit confusing so let's go over the elements. The first of the five allows you to 'change your name', the second deals with 'automatic log-ins', the third controls 'open states', the fourth deals with the 'context-menu options' and finally the fifth dictates the 'button's default action'.

In regards to changing your name: If this is your first time seeing a dialog asking for your name then please read the View my Journal section on why you should provide your 'name' and what exactly you should enter.

In regards to automatic logging: This is a unique feature that allows the extension to take you directly to the required page even if you are logged out. It will submit the form that's required for login without any intervention needed from you.

The caveat of this boon however is that, for reasons of security, it will not work unless Firefox is remembering your password. For example; when you first logged into Furjournal, Firefox will have asked 'Do you want Password Manager to remember this logon?'. If you replied yes then you can use automatic login, if you wish.

If you want to use this feature but you forgot to tell Firefox to remember your login then simply click Tools, then Options and in the new window, Privacy. After that, click the [+] sign next to Saved Passwords and then the [View Saved Passwords...] button. In the new dialog, click the 'Passwords Never Saved' tab and locate Furjournal, then click that. Finally, click [Remove].

Once Furjournal has been removed from your exceptions list, you may go to http://www.furjournal.furtopia.org/ind.php and enter your logon. Then, when Firefox asks you if you wish it to store the logon, tell it that you do and if it wasn't already, enable automatic logins via Furjournal Extension's options. Every section of Furjournal you visit then (including your own journal) will submit the form and log you in without needing any input from you.

If you're in a house with other people who use your PC or for whatever reason, then you might want to switch automatic logins off. Simply click the 'Nay' radio-button and then click the [Enforce] button. This will disable automatic logins and you will have to submit the forms yourself.

In regards to open states: This dicates how the extension will act when you click something within it. For example; by default, clicking 'Add an Entry' will open a new, focused tab in Firefox. Not everyone likes Firefox snatching attention away from their focused tab and some folks actually don't like tabs period.

The focused setting is default as I find it's most efficient for handling large journal sessions but if you'd wish to have it perform differently, the options dialog provides. If one was to set it to open in an 'unfocused' tab it would simply add a new tabto the tab-bar (at the relevant URL) without focusing it. On the other paw, 'new window' does just that, it opens a new window (to the relevant URL).

As a warning, I will note that it is impossible to automatically login when the browser can't see the page. So if you use the unfocused tab setting, automatic logging in will be disabled by the extension. To re-enable it, use either the new window or focused tabs options, then click the 'Yea' radio-button. At the moment, there is no known remedy to this problem.

In regards to the updates checking, the option is available from the context menu but can be configured in the options. You can set which of the three you wish to check, when you then do the check it'll open any new items in the selected global target (such as a new focused tab) and present them to you. If there are no updates, it will inform you of that and do nothing else.

In regards to the context-menu options: The extension can now paste 'Furjournal style' links, this means that if you have a link in your clipboard (such as 'http://www.mysite.org') then it will paste it with all the relevant linkcode, automatically substituting the 'http://' part with '/go/' as is required to save one the hassle. The same is true of images. This can be accessed via two ways, there's now a 'FJ Links' context-menu. You can paste links this way but if having that context-menu there all the time is annoying, one may simply turn it off by selecting 'Nay' under this option.

Worry not, the functionality is retained under [Alt]+[L] for a Furjournal style link and [Alt]+[I] for a Furjournal style image.

When pasting a link or an image, you have two methods for adding a description to a link or an alt text to an image. The first is that if you simply use the context or hotkey option without any text highlighted, a popup box will appear asking you for text. The default for links is "Link" and the default for images is "Alt". You can either accept this (cancel also selects the default) or you can write some different text in. If you highlight some text in the textbox and use the context option or the hotkey, the highlighted text will become the alt text/link description.

Additionally, the extension can now create technorati tags. Simply highlight a number of tags, separated by a comma, then a space (ex: tag one, tag two, tag three), then highlight the text and press the hotkey defined for making tags. The text will be instantly transformed into pre-formatted, fully functional technorati tags.

In regards to the button's default action: When the toolbar button is clicked or Alt+J is pressed (which can be redefined with the keyconfig extension [install]), the default result is the page where one can add a journal entry being opened. However, by using the checkboxes in the right pane, one can open a different page or even a collection of pages simultaneously!

The Furjournal Extension was created by Rowne for Sabu's wonderful Furjournal service and with the aid of a number of contributors. Please read the License and Credits document for more information..