Labs/Personas/Saving a Gallery Persona

Personas does not save the personas you use offline.  Therefore you must be online when you start Firefox in order for the persona you have chosen to be displayed.

However, it's possible to download the files for offline use.

Saving a gallery Persona

1. Select and apply the persona you wish to download
2. Find the extensions.personas.current entry in about:config . Or alternatively find the persona attribute in the HTML of the gallery page.
3. Where it says header and footer, you just need to add the storage URL

   http://www.getpersonas.com/store/

   • Example: For the theme Foxkeh, the entry is thus:
     • { "id":"6592", "name":"Foxkeh", "accentcolor":"#6b6b6b", "textcolor":"#d1d1d1", "header":"9/2/6592/1.jpg", "footer":"9/2/6592/2.jpg" }
   • So the actual URLs of the files are:

     Header: http://www.getpersonas.com/store/9/2/6592/1.jpg

     and

     Footer: http://www.getpersonas.com/store/9/2/6592/2.jpg

4. You can download the images from the calculated URLs.  If you want to use them offline, remember how the accent and text colors look, as you will need to re-enter them later.

Alternatively you could search for the images in your browser's cache. Go to about:cache?device=disk and search for "getpersonas.com/store/" . This method should work even if you have lost your network connection.

Using a saved Persona offline

1. If you haven't done so already, enable the Custom entry on the personas extension:
   • Click on the Personas icon at the left end of the status bar, and go to Preferences.
   • Check "Show Custom Persona in Menu" and click OK
2. Go to the Personas icon again, and from there to the newly-present Custom entry, and click Edit.
   
3. Fill out all the necessary information:
   • Put in the name of the persona - it doesn't have to be the same name, just put in whatever you like.
   • Navigate to the stored copies of the header and footer images of the persona
   • Recall the text and accent colors of the persona and fill them in - or experiment to find out what looks best.
   • Click OK, and your new offline persona will be applied!

This technique was originally described by AndyTheGeeky in http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla-labs-personas/browse_thread/thread/2df128a4a36c2be1/ce8aa497206b48ff . It has worked for versions of Personas up to to 1.2.1 (confirmed).

Be aware of license restrictions

(Some clarification is needed here.  I'm half-guessing from what I read some months ago...)

Not all personas are released under a the same Creative Commons License.  I hope it is legal to download any persona for offline use as described above.

But once you have a copy of the persona file, depending on its license, you might not have the right to redistribute it in edited form.

(If you think you might want to modify a persona later, it is worthwhile making a note of the name of the personas you downloaded, so that you can check the license later. I just make a bookmark for each Persona I like.)