Cope With It

I’ve seen enough of these out there and I think its time for me to put in my two cents on this topic.  Firefox plugins are the main reason I do all my development using FF first and IE second.  Well, let’s dive right in shall we?

1.  Firebug – There are very few truly excellent development tools out there, but this one tops the chart for me.  Useful for doing heavy troubleshooting of the most complicated websites, allows you to monitor everything from the DOM tree to the load times and even track the XMLHttpRequest traffic in your favorite Web 2.0 site.  Tweak CSS on the fly to tweak it until its right, then cut and paste the tests back to your source without having to constantly reload the page.  This one is a web developer’s dream come true.
2. Web Developer Toolbar – If there is something that complements Firebug, this is the toolkit.   A little bit of everything you need, and few things that you don’t.  Its almost overwhelming when you first look at the list of actions you can take with this.  I mostly use it to play with cookies and cache settings on the fly, not to mention the built in screen resize options allow you to preview the site on all the standard resolutions at the click of the mouse.
3. Tab Mix Plus – Tabs are where it’s at, and as good as Firefox tabs are, they just aren’t customizable enough for me.  Tab Mix Plus to the rescue.  It adds more options than you can shake a stick at, and to top it off, comes with an integrated session manager.
4. IE View Lite – Face it, the bulk of the world views the web through the rose colored glasses of IE.  IE View Lite adds a context menu link to “View This Page in IE”.  Right click, left click and BANG!  Watch IE Blow up your beautiful standards compliant design.
5. Screen Grab – Screenshots are always a useful tool.  For troubleshooting, or just recording a funny bug for posterity.  The biggest issue with using most screen shot tools is that they are limited to the visible screen.  Not this little toy, it has options to either Save to disk or Copy to clipboard a selected region, the visible portion of the page or the entire page as a single continuous file.  Nice for sending that preview to a client.
6. FEBE and CLEO – A pair of tools that make backing up and copying your Firefox Profile a snap.  FEBE is the backup utility, highly configurable, allowing you back up just about any part of your profile.  It has a scheduler as well, allowing you to do it on a regular basis.  CLEO compliments FEBE, you can select some or all of the backed up Plugins and Themes and it will create a single XPI file that you can then install into another copy of Firefox, giving you all your usual tools and themes on any number of installations.
7. Colorzilla -A color picker, use the eydropper just like Photoshop, click on a part of the page and you can select the color of that pixel, very handy when you are told “Just make it match the color of the frob in the corner”.
8. LiveHTTPHeaders – Useful in tracking the actual requests being made to the webserver and the responses being returned.  Very handy in tracking problems with redirections and other fun header hi-jinks.
9. LittleFox – Okay, before you complain, yes, this is a theme, and not a plugin, but I’m the type who wants the maximum real-estate to be available for the page, while still having access to all my tools.  This minimalist theme works great for doing just that.

This is my primary toolkit, I do have a couple of other items I use regularly like Zend Toolbar, and Selenium IDE as well, but these are more specialized tools that I think have a less general audience than those above.

Yes I know, yet another list….but I hope my not so humble opinion will help someone out who might be looking for a solid set of tools for use in developing websites.

There is nothing like seeing the work ‘free’ on something that you need or desire in life.  No feeling like knowing that you can get something for nothing.  Now we all know that this isn’t quite true, you always get what you pay for, and sometimes the payment is not in cash.

Last night, my fiance and I were coming home from walking the trail near the local high school, when we noticed a matching couch and love-seat set sitting on the side of the road in someone’s front yard.  On both items there was a sign reading “FREE!”.  Well we’ve been going back and forth about not having enough furniture in our living room to entertain, in fact, there was not really enough for us to relax in there ourselves.  One small love-seat and an antique rocking chair.  So we circled back around the block and pulled up to look at them.  It turns out that they were a little worn, but nothing physically wrong with them.  They were comfortable and clean.  After knocking on the door and confirming with the woman who answered about them I found that they just wanted to get rid of them because they had bought a new living room set.  I thanked he and told her we would get them out of her lawn ASAP.

The payment in this case was in physical labor.  It turns out that the two items both have 2 built in recliner sections.  So they  weigh considerably more than your average piece of modern furniture.  The couch was probably about 170-200 lbs and the love seat was close to 140.  We got them into my father’s truck with some effort and got them to the house just as the rain started.  We dropped them into the garage to wait to find out what we were going to do with them.

After cleaning out the living room, moving the old love seat to the sun room, we tried to bring them in through the back door, only to find that it was too narrow.  So we ended up carrying them completely around the house in the rain to wedge them into the front door.  More heavy lifting, not fun in the rain, and it just highlighted how out of shape I have gotten since leaving the military.

Mix it with the table that Jen just refinished holding the tv and all.  Plus all of her masterful decorating.  Plus my shelves full of buddhas.  Not a bad mix at all.  Comfortable and feeling like a home.

Here is the end result, not too bad in my opinion, especially with the price tag $0.00!