Generation of the Extension List

This page covers how my list of Firefox 2 extensions is generated. My list of Firefox 3.0 extensions and list of Firefox 3.5 extensions are generated the same way; only the cleanup script required some new tweaks.

There are a few extensions which will generate extension lists in html form, but I find InfoLister to be the best for generating public html, because of its templates feature. I prefer for my pages to be valid HTML 4.01, and with an InfoLister template, it's possible to come very close to automatic generation of valid documents. (Thanks to David McRitchie for pointing out to me how useful templates can be.)

Each extension contains some metadata: its home page URL, its description, the URL for its updates, &c. InfoLister reads that metadata and uses it to generate lists, formatted according to the template the user specifies. The problem with generating valid public html is that the metadata was not written with export to web pages in mind. It may contain some characters which have to be handled in a special way in html documents, such as ampersands and quotation marks. To deal with this problem, I wrote a bash script which uses sed to edit the output which InfoLister has created using my template. No one will want to use the script or template as-is, but it they might provide a helpful reference if you want to do something similar.

The paragraphs in the template aren't wrapped; I prefer to have my editor soft-wrap them instead. InfoLister automagically regenerates its output each time I start Firefox, and the script I use to update the site runs the cleanup script before it updates the public page.