I have gotten about 1.28 million requests to include a feature by which signatures could be stored remotely for easy synchronization between computers. The idea is that you could store your signature on a remote server server and retrieve it from whatever computer you are on. With many of the bug-fixes I wanted to take care of out of the way, I think we're getting closer to being able to actually put something like this in place, and I'd like to get some feedback on a few ideas.

Main Challenges:

1. Provide a stable remote location to store signatures
2. Secure the transfer of signatures from the remote server to your browser

1 - Remote Storage

The first issue is figuring out where exactly to host the signatures remotely. The idea situation would be to do so within Gmail itself, but I'm not sure how to go about it. If anyone knows how to store text somewhere within Gmail from a Firefox add-on and then retrieve it, that would be my prefered method. This would put the bandwidth burden on the Gmail servers and would keep your signature within Gmail. I'll look into this as I get time (which may be a while).

Alternatively, we could use the Blank Canvas server. This would involve registering for a free user account and storing your signature here. This would also allow me to more easily implement fancier "What you see is what you get" editors allowing you to manipulate your signatures without having to manipulate the HTML itself. In this situation, you would be presented with some kind of "Load Remote Signature" button when creating/editing signatures that would retrieve your stored signature from our servers.

2 - Security

Most people have sensitive information such as phone numbers and email addresses in their signatures. As such, I want to make sure that signatures are encrypted as they pass from the remote server to your browser. I'm looking at this secure ajax framework as a possible solution. Thoughts?

More later as I get time.

The Gmail suggestion is a good one, but since this is a Firefox extension, why not use something specific to Firefox - like bookmarks. I would have thought there is enough flexibility in the bookmark object model to store what is needed, and the added advantages are that people using FF Portable get to carry their signatures around, people using Foxmarks get synchronisation by default without the overhead of yet another online server, and signatures would still be available when using Gmail offline, when access to the online server would be tricky...

Just my 2p - not entirely thought through but might be worth a look.

Cheers,

Dave.

A good middle ground/short term solution would be to allow users to point to an HTML file on a drive or server somewhere and use that as the source for their signature.  That seems like it'd be fairly straightforward, and would allow people with a personal home page to host their own sig for use on multiple systems.  Ditto for users who carry thumb drives around.

Request #1.028.001
Amazing idea. Keep working on it please.
i can't help (no time and...no knwoledges) but i'd be able to find it very usefull. the bookmarks way seems to be the best way for the simplicity (storing 4 html files, sync with foxmarks).
what's about security if several people uses several account on the same windows account. will they be able to access others bookmarks's signatures ?

What about a document in GDocs.  Don't know if it is possible to access it from GMail though, but should be as the user is logged in.

Unfortunately I have no idea how you would go about doing that.

Hi Jerome - I just spent 3 lovely weeks in France using my linux netbook, but forgot until I got there that my signatures wouldn't follow me :(

Did you have any joy persuing this feature - e.g. storing them in bookmarks? I've not been involved in developing extensions myself, so I'm afraid I can't point to any known good resource for manipulating bookmarks, but this looks like a good place to start... https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Code_snippets/Bookmarks

Thanks,

Dave

I ise this addon across 4 different machines and having a central storage location within the addon would be fantastic - its my number 'wishlist item' for BC-Sigs

Currently I just store it in my online email drafts and copy/paste it if required.

Having it centralised using FireFox Faves/bookmarks would be ideal because all of using a book mark synch (google, xmarks, etc) can update the signature and hit 'synchronize' to flood it out to other systems.

looking forward to whatever solution you come upwith and happy to test if it helps!

Cheers.

Some people use gmail for their domain by MX resource record.  Once your return to development consider digging for a TXT RR that provides the (FTP) location for signatures

For everyone else, gmail per se, consider using sites.google.com .  Google sites has a ridiculously low monthly transfer for public sites.   An API for interacting with google-sites has been requested.  I suggest it here to get the issue more votes ;)

Alternately:  docs.google.com : Documents List Data API [blog]

Hopefully one of these will facilitate my original suggestion to use one of those for BOTH custom SuperStars storage AND custom Smileys storage

God bless!

I will be adding a "storage method" setting that lets you choose how you want to store your signatures. The default will be the current method, which is in the Firefox preferences local to each Firefox profile on your hard drive. The next method will be as a bookmark, since I'm pretty sure I'll be able to get it done and I (along with so many others) already use Xmarks. I'll look at adding other storage methods (such as securely on this web site) at some point as well.

Really glad to hear there's some progress on syncing signatures across machines. I'm using Weave, so I'll be happy to test that the bookmark method works with Weave as soon as its available...

Cheers

Dave.