• An option to replace your name with “me” when displaying
  comments.  You can adjust this option from the Pearl Comments
  options window.
• An option to show the URL of the page for each comment in the
  sidebar when the “Any Page” or “Recent” tab is active.  Set the hidden
  preference pearlcomments.showPageURLsInSidebar to “true” to enable this
  feature.  Each URL is displayed inside a <div> element that has
  the CSS class PearlCommentsPageURL.
• The capability to use a Pearl Comments stylesheet
  (pearlcomments.css) that is separate from userContent.css and
  userChrome.css.  For more information about customizing Pearl Comments for Firefox using CSS, see this blog posting.
• Firefox 3 compatibility.
• Russian translation.  Thank you Alexander Sokolov!

To upgrade the Pearl Comments browser extension, open Firefox’s Add-ons window and click “Find Updates” on the Extensions tab.

If you use the Pearl Comments Service, your server has already been upgraded for you.  If you have purchased a license for the Pearl Comments Server, please contact us to obtain the new server.

If you have any questions or suggestions for additional features, please contact us.

Pearl Comments 1.6 includes:

• Support for inline spell checking in Firefox 2.
• Improved international support. (Thank you Modex!)
• Improved saving of the selection when creating new comments.
• Option to ignore query string portion of the URL when creating or matching comments to web pages.

If you are already using Pearl Comments, you can update to the new version by using Firefox’s Add-ons manager. If not, you can try it at no cost.

All Mozilla-based browsers allow users to customize the display of web pages via a configuration file named userContent.css. To customize Pearl Comments, you add CSS rules to that same file. The first step is to find your profile folder. Inside the profile folder, you will find a folder named chrome. Inside the chrome folder you will need to create a text file named userContent.css (if that file already exists you can simply add more CSS rules to it). There is detailed information available on mozilla.org’s site. Remember to restart your web browser after changing the userContent.css file.

Here is a diagram that shows the classes you can use to customize the sidebar display:

Additional notes: the comment text is contained within an iframe, and the body of that iframe has the class PearlCommentSBBody. Also, if a comment has a status such as “In Progress” an additional class is assigned to its PearlComment element. The additional classes are:

* PearlCommentStatusInProgress
* PearlCommentStatusCompleted
* PearlCommentStatusClosed

Here are some examples that demonstrate how to customize the display of comments in the sidebar:

To hide the comment text, add this rule to your userContent.css file:
.PearlCommentsSidebar .PearlCommentFrame { display: none; }

To hide the topics, add this rule:
.PearlCommentsSidebar .PearlCommentsTopic { display: none !important; }

To display all text using a 9pt font, add these two rules:
.PearlCommentsSidebar * { font-size: 9pt !important; }
.PearlCommentSBBody { font-size: 9pt !important; }


If you want to use black text for the date and author (instead of the medium gray color used by default), add a rule like this one:
.PearlCommentsSidebar .PearlCommentsDateAndAuthor { color: black !important; }

To show “In Progress” comments on a light blue background, use:
.PearlCommentsSidebar .PearlCommentStatusInProgress { background-color: rgb(0,255,255) !important; }

Similar techniques are used to customize the display of comments that are shown on web pages. Here is a diagram that shows the classes you can use:

Additional notes: the comment text is contained within an iframe, and the body of that iframe has the class PearlCommentNoteBody. Also, if a comment has a status such as “In Progress” one of the status classes mentioned earlier is added to the PearlCommentNote elements as an additional class.

For example, if you’d like “Completed” comments shown on web pages to have a white background instead of a green one, add this rule to your userContent.css file:
.PearlCommentNote.PearlCommentStatusCompleted { background-color: white !important; }

To display topics in blue, add:
.PearlCommentNote .PearlCommentsTopic { color: blue !important; }

You can also control the appearance of the icons that shown on web pages. By default, they are somewhat transparent (opacity: 0.3). To remove the transparency entirely, add this rule to your userContent.css file:
.PearlCommentIcon { opacity: 1.0 !important; }

We plan to provide more extensive documentation soon, but this should get you started. If you want to tweak something and cannot figure out how, do not hesitate to ask us.

* You can view comments on the web page itself as icons or yellow “sticky notes” (as we talked about before). This feature is available in Firefox and SeaMonkey.

* A new Pearl Comments toolbar item allows easy access to the sidebar, preferences, and to the “view comments on the page” feature.

* The Pearl Comments sidebar now works inside the Nvu editor. Our customers who use Nvu can now manage comments while editing pages.

* Improved international support, including localized date/time display. If you are interested in translating Pearl Comments, please contact us.

* CSS can be used to control the appearance of comments in the sidebar and on the page. Soon we will post detailed information on how to use this feature.

In Firefox, use the extension manager’s update feature to download and install the new Pearl Comments extension. Or use our download page.

We just launched a new “try it” evaluation service which makes it even easier to experience Pearl Comments. No registration or subscription is required — just download our browser extension and start using the service. Of course there are some limitations; for example, all comments are public and they are deleted after just 4 hours. But for performing an initial evaluation of Pearl Comments, our “try it” evaluation service is a great option.

So, try Pearl Comments today!

In Pearl Comments, the possible status values are:

• None (no special status)
• In Progress
• Completed
• Closed

Comments that are In Progress are shown in orange and Completed comments are shown in green. The other comments are shown using the classic yellow “sticky note” color (we decided not to add a special color for Closed comments because they are hidden by default). It is also possible to override the colors we picked by editing Firefox’s user style sheet (we will post more about that another time).

What do you think about the colors we chose? Useful? Annoying? What colors would you use? There is still time to change them before we release the new version of Pearl Comments.

We are adding two modes for viewing comments on the page: show an icon for each comment or show the text and an icon for each comment. Here is an example that shows the text and icons for two comments:

Sometimes a comment obscures an important part of the page. You can temporarily move the comment by dragging it to another location. You can also hide a comment by clicking its close box (reopen it by clicking its icon). The icons are semi-transparent and positioned at the beginning of a comment’s selection.

A version of Pearl Comments that includes this feature is being tested now. Send us email if you want to try it out. If you have suggestions or ideas for improvement, comment here or send us feedback.

It’s been a while since our last blog entry. We’ve been busy revising two of our browser extensions. On January 5th, we released version 1.1 of Pearl Comments for Internet Explorer and Mozilla-based browsers including Firefox. This release has several fixes for all users and a new feature for Firefox users.

One of the fixes is for a customer who is building a site with tools that make heavy usage of frames and framesets. Unfortunately, previous versions of Pearl Comments weren’t able to retrieve the selection from within a frame, so comments couldn’t be attached to a specific portion of frame content. Another customer has an iframe on their web site and ran into the same problem. With version 1.1, selections within frames and iframes are stored properly. The remaining issue that we need to address in a future release is that when the comment is clicked, the original frameset is not loaded — only the inner frame document is loaded in the browser. For my own web development, I like to see the child frame but I’m sure others will find it disorienting to see a fragment of the page. I would love additional feedback on this issue: should clicking the comment load the child frame or the entire frameset?

Another fix for the Mozilla-based browser extension was to handle double-byte characters. I am so happy to be able to type Japanese and not have the characters mangled.

Lastly, Firefox users will enjoy the new feature we added in Pearl Comments 1.1 that allows them to enlarge or reduce the text within the comments display area. This feature is accessed from the contextual menu (control-click on Macintosh or right-click on Windows). The chosen text size is stored in the browser preferences so you won’t need to reset it each time you open Pearl Comments.

If you are using Firefox (which we recommend), then the automatic update mechanism should prompt you to download the new release soon. Alternatively, you can open Firefox’s Extension Manager and request an update to get the new version right away. Internet Explorer users can download the extension from the usual location.

So that’s it — some incremental but (hopefully) welcome improvements. If you have any Pearl Comments feature suggestions or annoyances you’d like us to fix, please send the details our way or add a comment below.

I have known Ed for many years dating back to when we were both students and employees at the University of Michigan. My colleague Kathleen Brade worked with him on the Student Conferencing Project when she was at UofM. Since that time, Ed has been involved in many pioneering ventures including MSEN (a very early ISP), First Virtual Holdings (first Internet-based electronic money transfer and payments system), and Socialtext (the first commercial Wiki company). He is currently focused on his own company, The Vacuum Group, where he takes on interesting projects and gets things done.

Ed recently posted a nice photo on Flickr that shows Pearl Comments being used in conjunction with the Ann Arbor District Library’s online catalog. After you take a look at that, check out his Vacuum blog which is filled with well-written and thought-provoking content.