Well, again, I haven't blogged in quite a while. Is anyone out there still reading my posts? If so, sorry I haven't 'entertained' you in so long. I've wanted to post about my favourite Firefox add-ons for quite some time. If you know what a 'Firefox add-on' is, you've probably read a list similiar to what I'm about to provide. If you don't know what I'm talking about, have a look and you may get some good ideas. Without further ado, here's my list of Firefox add-ons that I can't live without: Read It Later This is great. If you've ever looked at an article or web page that you really want to review but are short of time, this add-on is for you. In the past, I would create a bookmark or tag an article on del.icio.us if it was something that I really wanted to read later. That method almost always resulted in an unorganized list of links that I almost never got around to reading. With "Read It Later", you have a button that stores the current page on a list that you can view easily and quickly. When you want to read the article, simply select it from the list and it will take you to the page. When you finish reading the article, simply click another button to mark it as "read" and it disappears from your list. You can also click the "list" button to get the next item in the list. This is a very handy tool! Web Developer This is awesome if you design or create websites. It has so many useful features that a simple paragraph will not do it justice. You can view or edit CSS or HTML on the fly for the page you are on. You can view/edit cookies. You can view form details which will show you the names, ids, types, etc. of all form elements. You can display image infomation such as 'ALT' info, dimensions, paths, etc. You can (I now, I know, I'm saying "You can" too often, but with this add-on "you can" is very appropriate) view hrefs of all anchor tags, display all IDs and CSS class names. It will display rulers and line guides to help you adjust dimensions and coordinates. It will send your page for speed reports and validation at www.websiteoptimization.com and validator.w3.org respectively. I can go on and on, but you get the point - this is a necessity for any web developer. Firebug This is another web development "must have". I am hesitant to hype this up as much as I should, since I just raved about the "Web Developer" add-on, but this one is just as good for its purposes. With this one, you can hover over element on the page to inspect it in an HTML tree. you can view/edit the HTML and CSS for the page. You can see and edit the styles very easily. You can set breakpoints in the Javascript and change it and/or values on the fly. You can see the layout of an element graphically showing padding, margin, offset, dimensions and border. You can easily see the CSS selectors that apply to any given element. Again, there are too many great features to cover in one paragraph. NoScript This is an add-on that will prevent all JavaScript, ActionScript, Flash and Java unless you mark the site as "trusted". This simple add-on makes viewing web sites much safer. del.icio.us Bookmarks I've tried other del.icio.us add-ons before but this one, by Yahoo! (the company that bought del.icio.us) is the best that I've seen. It, obviously, has the button on the browser to quickly add a bookmark to del.icio.us. It also has a button that will bring up a sidebar with all your tags alphabetically and by frequency. The sidebar also has a flat list of all the bookmarks sortable alphabetically, by date added, by most visited, last visited and by site. The list is also searchable right from the sidebar. It also puts buttons on your toolbar for each of the bookmarks and has a drop-list for the excess. It adds a menu section to your browser that lets you manage your tags, view the bookmarks in different ways and get to del.icio.us account info quickly. Very cool! Well, that's my list for now. If you have others, feel free to add them! Submitted 2/15/2008 10:22:54 PMComment (0)
