Firefox Friday Feature of the Week: Personas

Today marks the very first Firefox Friday. It is the brainchild of Myra Jill. Every Friday, the members of the Mozilla Philippines Community will write a blog post and a tweet, with the tags #FirefoxFriday and #MozillaPH. As my personal twist on Firefox Friday, I will write about a Firefox feature that I like. The very first feature that I have chosen to highlight to day is Personas.

Personas is a light theming system for Firefox. It has drastically lowered the barrier of entry to make Firefox themes. There are now more than 35,000 themes available. As a user, I find that personas theme loads quickly and responsive. I could also choose a random theme from a certain category, and each of my Firefox windows will have a different theme.
You get Personas automatically when you download the Firefox 3.6, the latest release. If you like Personas so much, you can also get Personas Plus, an add-on that super-charges your Personas experience.

Campus Reps assignments for 1Q

Here are the assigned tasks for Mozilla Campus Reps.

• Renren
• Inquiry with NSTW folks regarding Mozilla involvement
• Mozilla Philippines Community t-shirt and badge design contest
• Jun
• Viral video channel
• CosPlay event/contest
• Joell
• Signage for Internet cafe and Jeeps

Other regular activities to participate include:

• Firefox Friday, post a Mozilla- or Firefox-related post on the blog or on Tweeter with a hashtag, #MozillaPH
  
• Mozilla Firefox on email signature
• Mozilla or Firefox logo spotted at... posts

You can do these regular events even if you're not a Campus Rep. If interested in joining, drop us a line in the comments and we'll get in touch with you as soon as possible.

Mozilla Campus Reps schedule of activities

The 2010 kick-off meeting of the Mozilla Philippines Community was held yesterday at the UP Ayala Technohub. A lot of items were discussed, but I will focus on the Mozilla Campus Representatives activities for the first quarter of this year. Most of these are simply to push Mozilla Firefox into schools, and establish Campus Reps in these campuses.

• IT Week, AMA Computer University, Quezon City
  The Campus Rep here is John Arce. The school term started late, and so the IT week has been moved as well to mid-February, hopefully not on Valentine's Day.
• IT Week, Colegio de San Juan de Letran, Manila
  There are no local campus reps, but they are currently represented by the campus reps from their sister school from Calamba. No dates have been set yet. Notice was given too late. It will be held tomorrow, Jan 28.
  
• IT Week, Colegio de San Juan de Letran, Calamba
  Local campus reps are Eusebio Barrun and Joell Lapitan. Tentative date is sometime in March.

If you want Mozilla Campus Reps to visit you, please get in touch with us through the comments.

Mozilla Campus Reps visit Angelicum College QC

The Mozilla Campus Reps Philippines participated in the IT Week of Angelicum College of Quezon City on Monday, December 14. This event is the first campus event conducted by the Campus Reps, and represents the first of the baby steps of the Campus Reps towards cross-campus event organization.

I accompanied Jun Barrun (shown in picture giving the Mozilla talk) from the Colegio de San Juan de Letran. We met at the Cubao MRT, where we rode a taxi to Angelicum College where we were met by Josie Santos, the adviser of the Computer Society that organized the IT Week. They were really supportive and helpful.

After the opening ceremonies of the IT Week, Jun spoke on the virtues of Mozilla Firefox and the Open Web Standards.

We were initially surprised at the size of the event, since was also a Family Day for the Angelicum College. Our Firefox booth consisted of two tables, two chairs and the Firefox tarpaulin from the "Fire Years of Firefox in Manila" event. The booth was positioned in front of the gym along with other booths, where we could receive a lot of foot traffic and eyeballs because of the ongoing events held at the gym. One of the most curious comments that we received was from a elementary school-aged girl who lingered about the booth, and told me, "Meron kami niyan sa bahay. Sabi kasi ni mama, mas maganda gamitin ang Firefox." "We have Firefox at home, because Mom said that it is better to use." She is one lucky girl who has a capable mom who can teach her how to use a secure web browser. I'll take a guess that her mom probably works in the IT industry.

We talked with the IT students on how Firefox helps with keeping the Internet free from non-open standards, as well as a possible "Firefox Installation Day" for their computer labs, which are currently using only IE.

We also received inquiries on how Mozilla is organized and operates, and how the Mozilla Philippines Community and the Campus Reps are able to participate in campus events.

We did run out of few Mozilla goodies that we had, and we even had to give away the ones that we were already using. For future events, we created a specific checklist to follow, in order to have a smooth operation of both the booth and the talk.

We are thankful for Josie Santos, and the Computer Society for having us in their event. We hope to attend future events in Angelicum College. We are also thankful for Regnard Raquedan for his support for the Campus Reps. Special mention also goes out to Campus Reps Myra Jill Siason and Joell Lapitan.

Update 2010-01-06: Josie sent a pic of Jun giving a talk on Mozilla Firefox and the Open Web.

Mozilla Campus Reps Philippines T-Shirt Design

I have finalized the design for the Philippine Campus Reps. Due to price constraints, I had to remove the Firefox logo at the back in order to conform with a 5-color scheme. I'll just replace it with "getfirefox.com" URL.

Update: New back print shown.

Firefox videos

mozilla firefox 3.5 from vineel reddy on Vimeo.

Thesis Proposal Done!

Yay! Tapos na me mag-thesis proposal...

And now to the heavy lifting >.<