First of all i would like to thank you all for the feedback you’ve given. It’s really inspiring to know that PimpZilla has such a huge fanbase.
The e-mails you’ve send me have certainly motivated me to start working on an upgrade.

Things have changed a bit since my last post; whereas the emphasis used to lie be on being a Mac (daddy), it’s now on being a Daddy. Two young daughters take up most of my spare time. I hope you understand that i reserved the ample time that i had on a project that actually made a bit of money.

Another reason for the long delay is that i also forgot how to set up a working environment for developing a theme.

Having said that, Money isn’t everything and knowledge can be attained. I am therefore happy to inform you that work has started on PimpZilla 5. It will take me a while to build the thing from the ground up. A complete overhaul is necessary, given the nature of the new sourcecode of Firefox. It will probably be available somewhere in the fall.

The status is that i’ve succesfully set up a working environment, and the fur-leopard skin tabbar more or less functions. Watch this blog for progress-reports!

Hi folks,

It’s been a while since my latest entry. A lot has happened since october, a global financial crisis, my second daughter Lisa has been born and Mozilla came up with a new version of Firefox.

I am now the proud father of 2 beautiful daughters. Emma and Lisa require lot’s of attention though, so i haven’t had the time to do some work on pimpzilla. There isn’t a version for 3.5 yet… There will be one, in due time.

Working on an opensource project like Pimpzilla is nice for the infinite honour and glory, but it doesn’t pay the bills. www.droominfo.nl (my other hobby-project) does generate some revenue. The scarse computertime that i have is being put to use on this dutch site about dreams.

I  miss my furry theme in firefox 3.5 too. I WANT to create a new version.

As a father i also want to take care of my family. Projects that actually make some money have priority over other stuff. I need incentive. I will start developing on PimpZilla when revenue is reasonable for the effort that is necessary, let’s say 2500 euro.  If a small percentage of the 180.000 daily users make a paypal donation, i will be on my way.

It’s up to u to speed up development. I will keep track of the incentive-status via this blog.

[UPDATE] donation-status: $550,-

(a big thnx to Christian, Nicolas, Jan, Peter, Heidemarie, Raymond,  Jan, Marco, Jason, Stefan, Symbiotic games, Christopher, Kelly, Williams Design Group, Christopher, Liz, Maureen, Alex, Jeremy, Katrina, Randall, Amanda, Honey, Molly, Lola, Jason, Peter, Wolf, Meik, Karin, Birthstone  Blue, Alan, Lily, Damien, Paula !)

Hi Folks,

PimpZilla just exceeded  2.000.000 downloads. A new version (4.08) will be available soon @ the official Mozilla website, just to celebrate this sexy milestone.

I have learned by the way that PimpZilla is used by 175.000 people on a daily basis. (courtesy of mozilla’s developer-panel). That’s a lot of people exhuming computer-funk! Keep it up, fight the power and stick it to the man!!!

My colleagues and I were invited to the Google headquarters in Dublin, because of our various implementations of AdSense for Zeelandnet.nl (the company that i work for) We’d thought it would be a great experience, if only to learn some ‘best practices’ for implementing Google services and to strengthen the ties with our friends abroad.

The trip turned out to be far more valuable than just acquiring handy tips…

The start of our journey was a wee bit troublesome due to a malfunctioning Garmin navigation system that decided to send as far away from the airport @ Charleroi as possible. We nearly made it (screeching car tires, wrong parking lot, running to the checkin) This made us all a bit silly from the nerves. The arrival in Dublin wasn’t a walk in the park either: The (drunk) bus-attendant send us to a wrong university. So after a long journey we deserved a good night on the town with lot’s of Guinness. and so we did.

The next day we went to Google to meet up with our accountmanager Alexandru, who had set up a programme for the day. We were proud to have our picture taken with him:

 From left to right: Joris, Maria, Jeroen, Marco and Alexandru.

We kicked of with Alexandru and Walter, who gave us  information on the inner workings of AdSense and supplied us with valuable tips on how to generate more revenue for ZeelandNet. They also gave examples of other succesfull implementations in other websites.

After that we had a short meeting with Damien, the head of Adsense and Youtube for Europe, the Midde-east and Africa. I was very impressed by the openness and candour of his conversation. Damien was interested in our experiences with Google products. We supplied him with feedback from our users and we gave us our vision on how (or if) multimedial content could be monetized.

After that we spoke with Els (a represent of Youtube) about legal issues with regards to videocontent. We also spoke with Mark about the possiblities of adwords for online marketing.

These meeting took the whole day, but it seem to pass in an instant. Alexandru was so kind as to take us on a tour to see the niceness of Ireland. We took a train down the coast and made a very pleasant walk.

I guess we were all impressed the most by the corporate culture of Google. It is very open, the employees are very well facilitated, and it just all looks supercool. It’s serious business nonetheless, and Googlers are very skilled and motivated.

@Alexandru: Thanks for your time and attention. You gave us a wonderfull time and you’ve inspired us to keep on improving our business and ourselves.

An early version of the next incarnation of this glorious theme is available for download @ pimpzilla.nl. (I’ve been trying to upload the pre-release of PimpZilla 4.0 to the official Mozilla site, but it’s too busy over there).

PimpZilla 4.0 is build from the ground up. No cutting & pasting of the old code, it is completely rebuild with the original firefox-code. That’s a lotta work, and i haven’t finished it yet: the new Pimpzilla hasn’t got the same level of excellence as you might had gotten used to, but it is good enough to browse with nonetheless. You can allready see the outline of some very stylish innovations, such as the urlbar and searchbox …

Expect regular updates @ this site!

P.S. Thanx for the donation Caroline and Robert. Support from fans like you inspire me to keep on developing!

I’ve been getting a lot of mail from Pimpzilla-users asking me for a theme for Thunderbird (the emailclient of Mozilla). Though i would love to build one, this isn’t soon to be a reality. Building a full swing-theme takes up a lot of time, time that i can also spend on projects that actually make some money (like building websites) Surely ya’ll can appreciate to need to get paid!

If a paypall sort of thing can offer some doe, then i would be creating pimpzilla spin-offs all the time. What do you think? Would there be a way to collect cash without offending the open-source spirit (which states that everything is forever costless) ?

By the way: pimpzilla 4.0 is in the works

The first line of a newly learned programming language is often: “Hello world!”. It is also the first line of the new pimpzilla blog, which now uses Wordpress as engine. I needed a new blog, since the old one was covered with spam. I have to say that i completely love Wordpress: it is filled with all the blog-goodies i could ask for. Blogger.com is also very nice  (i tried that one first) but WP offers more options for tweaking. And when you are reading this blog, u probably know that i love to tweak things