Introducing Check Links: an extension for Thunderbird

Check Links is a new extension for the Thunderbird email client. With Check Links, you can review the web addresses (URLs) of all hyperlinks in a draft email message before sending. Never send an email with broken or incorrect links again! 

 

Get started by clicking the Check Links button on the compose toolbar. 

Review each link one at a time with Message View.

Keep reading to learn more about Check Links, and how to get involved as a beta tester! 

Features

• Choose how you want to review the links in your draft email. Use Message View to review the links one by one in a message preview. Or select Table View where you can review all of them at a glance. 
• Check Links can also detect link placeholders in your email, allowing you to replace them with a proper hyperlink. 

Testers Wanted!

Check Links is in the beta testing phase, and is being made available to early adopters and enthusiasts who are keen on trying out the latest and greatest!

You can get the latest beta release from the Check Links page on the AE Creations website, where instructions on how to install into Thunderbird are provided. Please note that it's not yet available on the Add-ons for Thunderbird website.

Check Links is compatible with Thunderbird 128 and newer.

Report a Bug

An up-to-date list of known issues can be found in the Check Links project on GitHub.

If you find a bug or have an idea for an enhancement, you may file a bug report on GitHub. Please search the issues list first to confirm that your issue has not already been reported.

Help and Support

Questions and comments about Check Links should be posted to the AE Creations Help and Support forums, hosted on Groups.io.

AE Creations Help and Support Forums moved to Groups.io

The AE Creations Help and Support Forums has moved to a new forum host. It is now hosted on Groups.io, and can be found at this web address:
https://groups.io/g/aecreations-help.

Anyone can browse the forum posts, but to create a new post or reply to existing posts, you must subscribe to the forum.

To get started, send an email to the subscribe email address listed in the forum home page. If you prefer to post to the forum through the web interface, you'll need to register for a Groups.io account.

Once your membership to the forum is approved, you'll receive a welcome email with instructions on how to post to the forum, change your email subscription options, set forum preferences, and more.

The old Google Groups forum is now read-only; no new posts can be created. The old forum will remain online for browsing messages prior to January 2023.

Again, apologies for the inconvenience and thanks for your patience.

Updated 12 January 2023 - Improved instructions on how to get started in the new forums, and clarified that registering with Groups.io is needed if the web interface is preferred.

Introducing Read Next: The reading list that syncs to the cloud

Read Next is a new Firefox extension from AE Creations that adds a reading list sidebar to your browser window. It's similar to the reading list found in other browsers such as Safari and Google Chrome, but with some unique features.

 

The Read Next reading list sidebar.

 

Add a link to the reading list with just one click of the address bar button.

Keep reading to learn more about Read Next, and how to get involved in the beta testing phase!

Features

• Add new links for reading later with just one click of the address bar button.
• Reading list sidebar where you can browse or search for saved links to the web pages you want to resume reading. You can choose to filter out links that you've already visited, showing only unread links.
  
• Keep your reading list lean and organized with options such as automatically deleting saved links once you've clicked on them, and highlighting unread links in bold text.
• Synchronize your reading list to the cloud with Dropbox to make your reading list available on your other devices with Firefox and Read Next installed.

Learn more about Read Next by visiting the home page on the AE Creations website.

Testers Wanted!

Read Next is in the beta testing phase, and is being made available to early adopters and enthusiasts interested in trying out the latest and greatest!

You can install the latest beta release from the Read Next page on the AE Creations website. Please note that it's not yet available on the Firefox Add-ons website.

New beta releases will be pushed out as bugs are fixed and improvements are added; they'll be announced here on the AE Creations Blog.

Report a Bug

An up-to-date list of known issues can be found in the Read Next project on GitHub.

If you find a bug or have an idea for an enhancement, you may file a bug report on GitHub. Please search the issues list first to confirm that your issue has not already been reported.

Help and Support

Questions and comments about Read Next should be posted to the AE Creations Help and Support forums, hosted on Google Groups.

AE Creations website is now at aecreations.io

To improve site uptime reliability, I have changed the website hosting provider for the AE Creations website. It's now hosted on Dreamhost, and its website address is https://aecreations.io.

If you have bookmarked any web pages from the old SourceForge website, consider updating your bookmarks. To help ease the transition, the old website will continue to exist in parallel to the new website for a short time.

With this change, there are plans to also change the hosting of the AE Creations Help and Support Forums. Currently, it is with Google Groups, and I'm aware that many people would rather not have to create a Google account to participate in the forums. More on this to come.

Clippings for Thunderbird now available on the Add-ons for Thunderbird website

Until now, Clippings for Thunderbird was available exclusively on the AE Creations website with downloads served by GitHub. Starting today, Clippings for Thunderbird is also available on the Add-ons for Thunderbird website, making it more visible to Thunderbird users who are browsing through add-ons.

The new web presence on the Add-ons for Thunderbird website provides much of the same information as the AE Creations website, with the additional ability to add a review.  So if you love using Clippings for Thunderbird and want to rave about how much it has made writing emails quicker and more efficient, or if there is something about Clippings that you think could be improved -- add a review!

Coming soon: Clippings for Thunderbird 6.0

After a few months of work, I'm ready to announce that a new version of Clippings for Thunderbird is coming soon, and will be compatible with Thunderbird 78.

The first beta release will be made available in the next few days for testers and early adopters craving the latest and greatest. If you're keen on being one of the first users to try it out, keep an eye on this blog as well as the AE Creations Help and Support forums for the beta release announcement.

AE Creations website address change

The web address (URL) of the AE Creations website has changed. It is now https://aecreations.sourceforge.io.

If you have bookmarked the old web address, there's no need to worry about updating them -- you will be automatically redirected.

With this change, all content will now be loaded securely. On Firefox, you'll notice the padlock icon appearing on the address bar, as well as the https prefix on the web address.

The AE Creations website is now delivered securely to your browser using HTTPS.

In addition, the AE Creations Blog will also be loaded securely. Look for the padlock icon and the https prefix on the web address when browsing blog posts.

Please post a comment below if you run into any difficulties with the website or this blog (for example, broken images or jumbled page content). Happy browsing!

Send Tab URLs discontinued

Now that Firefox ESR version 60 has been released, and Firefox ESR 52.x will reach end-of-life status very soon, Send Tab URLs is officially discontinued.

Send Tab URLs relies on a lot of functionality that is not possible with WebExtensions. For example, it is no longer possible to get the default email client that is set in Windows. With that, it was decided that rewriting Send Tab URLs into a WebExtension is not feasible.

For users looking for an alternative, consider FoxyTab by erosman. Among many things you can do with this add-on, you can copy a list of URLs for all your browser tabs, or just the ones to the left or the right of the current tab. You can also choose to copy just the URLs of the browser tabs only, or both the page titles and URLs. You can then paste the list into the editor window of your email program, and format it as desired.

The Send Tab URLs page on the AE Creations website will be taken down soon, but the Send Tab URLs discussion category in the Help and Support forums will continue to be available.

AE Creations website down again

UPDATE (3 Mar 2018 @ 10:00pm PST): The AE Creations website is now up again. Thanks for your patience.

The AE Creations website is currently offline. The site is hosted on Sourceforge.net, which has undergone a recent datacenter move, and now there is word of a denial of service attack, affecting all project web sites, including AE Creations.

To download and install Clippings and Panic Button, head to the Mozilla Add-on pages for these add-ons. If you need help on them, browse or post to the AE Creations Help and Support Forums on Google Groups.

Clippings 6 is temporarily unavailable

Apologies for the short notice, but Clippings 6 is currently unavailable for download and installation.

Clippings 5.5.2 is still available for Mozilla Thunderbird, and for Firefox ESR 52.x.  It can be found in the Past Versions page on the AE Creations website.

A minor release of Clippings 6 is currently in the works and will be released soon.  A release announcement will be posted here when it becomes available.

Compatibility with Firefox 57

Many users have been wondering about plans to make the AE Creations extensions compatible with Firefox 57, which is scheduled for release in November 2017, and is expected to remove all support for legacy extensions.  Clippings, Panic Button and Send Tab URLs are all legacy extensions, and would need to be completely rewritten as WebExtensions to be compatible with Firefox 57 and future releases of Firefox afterwards.

After spending the last few months studying developer documentation, developing prototypes and understanding the capabilities and limitations of WebExtensions, I have enough information to announce plans for compatibility with Firefox 57.

Clippings

Clippings will be completely rewritten as a WebExtension.  The legacy extension will continue to be supported for Thunderbird, which is not switching over to WebExtensions at this time.

Clippings will be subjected to the limitations of WebExtensions, in that many existing features will no longer be available.  Examples are color-coded labels on clippings, ability to choose data source location, backing up and restoring the data source, and exporting clippings to HTML.

For current users of Clippings, there will be a migration step that everyone will have to perform when upgrading to the WebExtension-compatible version of Clippings.  A final legacy version of Clippings will be released in advance of Firefox 57 to make it possible to perform this migration; more information on this is coming soon.


Panic Button

Panic Button will be completely rewritten as a WebExtension.  Like Clippings, it will be subjected to the limitations of WebExtensions; as a result, some features in Panic Button 3.x will no longer be available in the WebExtension-compatible version of Panic Button. Examples include the "Hide All Windows" action, custom toolbar button icons (but the 20 predefined toolbar button icons will still be available to choose from), and changing the shortcut key for invoking the Panic Button action.


Send Tab URLs

Send Tab URLs is the least-used extension from AE Creations, with 5,786 average daily users between July 2016 and July 2017, compared to 8,354 for Panic Button and 35,962 for Clippings.  I've decided to discontinue development of Send Tab URLs, and focus on Clippings and Panic Button.

Delicious Post discontinued

Due to ongoing unresolved issues with the Delicious APIs, especially the constant "error saving link" errors, I have decided to discontinue Delicious Post.

The Mozilla Add-ons page for Delicious Post has been deactivated, and the Delicious Post page on the AE Creations website has been taken down.  Downloads are no longer available; however, the Delicious Post forum will remain active.

If you already have Delicious Post installed, you can continue to use it (and put up with the ongoing errors originating from the Delicious Post API), but because development of Delicious Post has ended, no new features or bug fixes will be available.

Delicious Post is confirmed to be functioning with multi-process browser tabs (a.k.a. Electrolysis or e10s) -- for now.

Current users should consider looking at alternatives, such as the Delicious bookmarklet that is available from their website.

Delicious Post has been one of my favourite add-ons to work on.  Years ago, I had forked the original "post to del.icio.us" add-on which was no longer maintained, and added a few features to make it better while maintaining its lightweight simplicity.  I'm a Delicious user myself, so I counted myself as one of its avid users.  It's regrettable that it has come to this, but having struggled with poorly-documented third party APIs that are outside my control and for which there are no known workarounds to its issues, I felt that this was the best course of action.

Thanks to all of its users, past and present, for their support.

AE Creations website outage

The AE Creations website is currently unavailable due to a server outage on SourceForge.net, the website host.  This outage has been going on since 17 July.

In the meantime, the minimalistic fallback site, hosted on GitHub, is available for those who seek the comfort of visiting a website with the AE Creations name.  The Mozilla Add-ons pages for Clippings, Panic Button, Send Tab URLs and Delicious Post are available as well.

Updated 2015-07-22: The website is now up and running again.

New website and project hosting!

The new AE Creations website is now live!

aecreations.sourceforge.net

The recent and unexpected shut down of the Mozdev project hosting service was an opportunity to do a complete website redesign, moving away from the tired old look (which was really just to integrate with and slightly improve upon the default Mozdev website theme) and into something more modern -- with fresh colors, elegant fonts that are readable yet pleasing to the eye, and an improved organization of the website content.

Background

Due to the presumed shut down of Mozdev, the previous project host for the website, source code repository and bug tracking for AE Creations extensions, I've been scrambling to find a new home for them.

I've settled on using GitHub for the source code repository and bug tracking.  Originally I was going to use SourceForge (I already have an existing account for a really old project), but I like GitHub's issue tracking features which organizes issue tickets (e.g. bugs, feature enhancement requests) based on repository; by comparison, SourceForge's issue tracking functionality isn't as good as what I found with GitHub.  Since I can organize the source code for each extension in separate repositories, the bugs would naturally be organized based on extension.  So that made GitHub the best choice.  (I'm still using SourceForge to host the source code for Clippings Editor, a stand-alone utility for Clippings users who want to create and organize clippings for distribution to multiple users.)

What remained is hosting the AE Creations website.  GitHub provides project website hosting with GitHub Pages -- however, it only handles static HTML pages; server-side scripting (e.g. PHP) isn't supported.  This would make maintenance a nightmare when I have to update content that appears in multiple web pages, like page headers, footers and navigation.  But SourceForge supports PHP, handles load balancing, and has some other powerful project web hosting features, described here.  I won't necessarily be using all the available features (like MySQL databases and basic HTTP authentication), but it's great that they are available if and when I need them.

The plain, bare-bones temporary website that previously appeared under the above URL can now be found at aecreations.github.io. This will be the fallback website in case the website on SourceForge ever goes down.

What's next

There are a few minor tweaks I want to make to the website, such as implementing a nicer 16x16 pixel favicon -- but for the most part, the major work on it is done.

My focus will soon turn to updating my extensions to work with the new Australis look that will be coming soon in a future Firefox release.

AE Creations forums have moved

Due to a shutdown of the forum hosting software on Mozdev.org, the AE Creations forums are no longer available.  Unfortunately, any messages that were there before have disappeared.

I've created a new forum on Google Groups, which you can find here:

https://groups.google.com/d/forum/aecreations-help

Anyone can view postings, but a Google account is required to post a new message, or reply to an existing message.

P.S.: The link to the forums from the AE Creations web site is still pointing to the old, non-functional forums.  That will be changed shortly.

AE Creations extension compatibility with Firefox 3.5

Firefox 3.5, the next release of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, is now available as a release candidate for users and web developers eager to preview the latest and greatest. There is something new for everyone -- like private browsing, support for geolocation, a new JavaScript engine, native audio and video support and other cool features. To learn more, check out this post from the Mozilla Blog.

Status of extension compatibility

All extensions from AE Creations -- Clippings, Panic Button, Send Tab URLs, and the newest member of the lineup, Delicious Post -- are compatible with the Firefox 3.5 release candidates, and will be compatible with the official 3.5 release when it comes out.

Delicious 1.0 released!

Version 1.0 of Delicious Post, a Firefox extension for posting a link or web page to the Delicious online social bookmarking service, has been released and is available for download.

Check out the Delicious Post page at the AE Creations website for details and download links. You can also find this information at Mozilla Add-ons.

Delicious Post is available in English (United States), Chinese (Simplified), French, Italian, Polish, and Portuguese (Brazil). Many thanks to the translators at Babelzilla for making it available in these languages.

Acknowledgement

Delicious Post is based on Patrick H. Lauke's del.icio.us post extension.

New AE Creations forums

Starting now, all questions, comments and feedback relating to Clippings, Panic Button and Send Tab URLs extensions should be directed to the new web-based forums.

Anyone can browse through forum posts and comments, but to create a new post or comment on existing posts, you must be logged in to the forums. New forum users can register for a new account.

All forum users are expected to abide by the forum rules.

The forums are a replacement for the mailing lists, which will be discontinued. The two mailing list archives (prior to December 2008) will remain available for browsing: AE Creations, Clippings.