The Fire.fm extension is more than four years old today. I created it with coworker Jose Enrique Bolaños to submit it to the Extend Firefox competition. It was a great product, if I can say so myself. It won the Best Music add-on prize and garnered a great deal of users and good reviews at the time.
Unfortunately, the Last.fm service has changed a lot throughout the years, becoming more closed to the public with every iteration. When we created this add-on, Last.fm radio streaming was available anonymously to everyone around the world. Today, only paying customers can access this service. This has lead to us becoming less and less interested in adding features and even maintaining it.
So, while my interest in the project is minimal, I still reply to support email and try to fix it whenever it is broken in a significant way. I think we did a good job with Fire.fm, because it has required very little maintenance in the past couple of years, with only 6 minor bug fix releases in 2 years, including today’s release. Yet, there are plenty of rough edges by now, and the day will come when something will break in a way that takes too much work to fix, and I doubt we’ll do anything about it.
I decided to move the sources to GitHub, to make them a bit easier to maintain. The project had been hosted at SourceForge and its sources managed with SVN all these years. And, while I think SVN works well for small projects like this one, GitHub’s design is pure genius and sufficient for me to deal with an extra layer of indirection when pushing code.
So, Fire.fm is on life support, but other exciting projects will come and supersede it. It was a cool thing to work on, and its codebase has been very useful to me across the years. I’m happy to revisit its code a couple times a year, but I’m even happier starting new stuff.
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