“I’m a pretty positive person — I consider it one of the keys to the modest success I’ve had in creating new habits and achieving things in the last few years.

I couldn’t have run three marathons without a positive mindset, nor created Zen Habits, mnmlist, or The Power of Less. I couldn’t have lost 50 lbs., quit smoking, eliminated my debt, or quit my day job.

Positive thinking, as trite as it seems, has changed my life.

I’m not going to sell you on it, but if you’re interested, here’s the condensed guide to changing your own life:

Good to think about in terms of getting annoyed at someone; eating a cake.

Whether you’re happy or sad, there’s always a stimulus that started it but it’s always our response that has the deciding say.

That’s right kids, if you didn’t already know it, it’s actually possible to view the source of any (and I mean ANY) Firefox add-on out there.

It’s REALLY easy, here’s how:

1. Navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\

2. If you see the Application Data folder, that’s great proceed to step 3.  If not, you’ll need to turn on showing of hidden files and folders (see this page for how to do it: http://rmanimaran.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/show-hidden-files-and-folders-problem-in-windows-xp/ )

3. Navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

4. By default, here you should see only one folder with a name ending in “.default”, mine is  ”ki46qtd0.default”.  So open that up.

5. Navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ki46qtd0.default\extensions and here we need to find the folder that belongs to the Google Toolbar.  Unfortunately each Firefox toolbar can have its own unique number, see screenshot below:

One easy way of telling which toolbar is the one you’re looking for is looking at the Date Modified column.  I know that I installed the toolbar just now at the time of writing so it’s easy for me.   So once you’ve found which add-on you want, open up this folder and proceed to the next step.

7. Once you’re inside this folder, you’ve done it! Congratulations! What you see now is the bare-bones of the Firefox add-on.  All the code of any Firefox add-on is stored in the “/chrome” folder so open up that folder.

8. Now, here’s the tricky part.  On some Firefox add-ons, once you open the chrome folder, you can see all of the code inside.  With many others however (including the Google Toolbar) all you see is a .JAR file.

Oh no, you say! A JAR file, that’s a compiled Java class right? Well…not quite.  It’s actually a ZIP file with a .JAR extension so if you have WinRAR (http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm) or WinZIP (http://www.winzip.com/downwz.htm) installed you can right click on the file and go to Extract Here.

9. That’s it! Once you’ve done that you can access all of the code for the Firefox add-on by browsing the folder structure that you’ve just extracted.  The juicy stuff is in the “/content” folder.

It’s beyond the scope of this post to describe in full the structure of a Firefox add-on so if you need help you can check my previous post here: http://manilacalling.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/beginners-guide-to-creating-a-firefox-add-on/

http://www.devilsworkshop.org/shortest-tutorial-for-firefox-extensiontoolbar-development/ – ostensibly the shortest beginner’s guide to developing an add-on.  I’ve yet to see a shorter or better explained tutorial.

http://firefoxdev.blogspot.com/ a blog dedicated to tips and tricks when developing

Of course the original documentation is useful at times and can be found here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Extensions