November 23rd, 2009
Here is my list of firefox plugins that I use with Firefox version 3.5.5 It has taken a long time to refine this collection over the years. Many plugins are biased for web development, but there are several that extend firefox for day to day tasks that improve the usability, and security.
Improve Security
- NoScript Extra protection for your Firefox: NoScript allows JavaScript, Java (and other plugins) only for trusted domains of your choice (e.g. your home-banking web site). This whitelist based pre-emptive blocking approach prevents exploitation of security vulnerabilities (known and even unknown!) with no loss of functionality… Experts will agree: Firefox is really safer with NoScript
- AdblockPlus Ads were yesterday!
- Locationbar Formats and linkifies addresses in your Location bar.
- FormFox Pops up form action when submit button is about to be clicked.
Improve Usability
- YetAnotherSmoothScrolling Get THIS Now and improve page scrolling.
- AutoPager AutoPager is a firefox/mozilla extensions to autoloading next page at backgrand.And you can use it an XPath generator too. Get this now and browse forums/blogs with ease.
- BBCode Adds Formating (BBCode/HTML/XHTML/etc.) to the context menu for Blogs and forums (PHPBB and others).
- CustomizeGoogle Enhance Google search results and remove ads and spam
- DownloadStatusbar View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar
- ErrorZillaPlus Show a more useful error page when the network address cannot be reached.
- FireGestures Executes various commands with mouse gestures.
- ImageZoom Adds zoom functionality for images. Is that image too small??? simply zoom in and take a closer look.
- SessionManager Saves and restores the state of all windows. Need to leave the computer quickly – spent hours searching google with loads of windows open? A couple of clicks and your session is saved for when you want to resume…
- TabMixPlus Tab browsing with an added boost. Awesome… Many options to this plugin…
- ThumbnailExpander Expands image thumbnails into full images and embeds some video links.
- ToolbarButtons Adds toolbar buttons to the customize toolbar window in several programs including Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird. Some of the buttons make commonly preformed actions quicker, others add new functionality. Loads of new buttons for you to add to your toolbar – I recommend the font size plus/minus buttons to make those hard to read sites that bit larger….
- URLLink Allow navigation to broken/unlinked URLs
- Greasemonkey A User Script Manager for Firefox. I have only one greasemonkey script installed, and its the one that changes url type text in paragraphs to clickable links.
Informative
- Flagfox Displays a flag depicting the location of the current server
- Forecastfox Get international weather forecasts and display it in any toolbar or statusbar with this highly customizable extension.
Web Development
- RegularExpressionsTester Testing Tool for regular expressions. Updates as you type – great for testing
- CSSUsage Firebug extension to view which CSS rules are really used on your site.
- CodeBurnerforFirebug Extends Firebug with reference material for HTML and CSS
- ColorZilla Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies
- Console The next generation error console.
- DOMInspector Inspects the structure and properties of a window and its contents.
- Dust-MeSelectors Finds unused CSS selectors
- ExtendedStatusbar A Statusbar with speed, percentage, time and loaded size (similar to Opera’s one)
- FireDiff Track Changes in Firebug
- FireQuery jQuery enhancements for Firebug
- FireRainbow Javascript syntax highlighting for Firebug
- Firebug Web Development Evolved. AWESOME – for anyone involved in web development.
- Firecookie Cookie manager for Firebug. Firebug has to be installed in order to use this extension.
- FirefinderforFirebug Finds HTML elements matching chosen CSS selector(s) or XPath expression
- HtmlValidator Adds HTML validation to the View Page Source of the browser. The validation is done by Tidy or a SGML Parser from W3c. Maybe the programmers at ebay should have a look at this plugin…
- IETab Enables you to use the embedded IE engine within Mozilla/Firefox. One click and you can see how the page looks in Internet Explorer. (if you must)
- LibraryDetector Detects what javascript libraries are being used on the current page and displays the result as icons with detailed tooltips in the statusbar. Currently supports jQuery, jQuery UI, Prototype, Scriptaculous, Dojo, YUI, Qooxdoo, MooTools, Ext JS and Spry.
- LiveHTTPHeaders View HTTP headers of a page and while browsing.
- SeoQuake Quick view of site parameters in the search engine results pages.
- UrlParams Displays GET/POST parameters in the sidebar.
- WebDeveloper Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
Occasionally Useful
Tell me which plugins you use!
Tags: Firefox
Posted in Software, Web Development | No Comments »
November 20th, 2009
Epson D88
I suppose the reason most people buy an Epson is because non genuine ink cartridges can be purchased for a fraction of the price. Although it will invalidate the warranty and may cause print problems the possible savings outweigh the risks.
Epson D88 installation includes a small program called status monitor that shows the ink levels and such. This will pop up a warning window whenever there is a problem with the ink cartridge, including the times when genuine cartridges are not recognized.
A simple fix is to disable the status monitor by;
-> Go to control panel and click printers and faxes;
-> right click d88 and choose properties
-> click “printing preferences”
-> then maintenance tab
-> then click the button Speed and Progress
-> now tick the box to Disable the Status Monitor
Tags: Printing, Tips
Posted in Hardware | No Comments »
November 14th, 2009
As a small PHP project I wrote an Ecard app – quite straightforward, choose a pic, enter names and emails and a quick message…
The problem I had was when someone would enter a huge line of text, (like a whole bunch of !!!!!!!!!!!’s the line would flow off the right hand side of the page. If I were using tables, then the right hand side border of the table would be pushed out to the right. Both circumstances would mess up the layout of the web page.
I chose to program a solution to filter the input, rather than changing the text during the output.
First I tried writing a function in php to split the lines into an array, then check each line for long words and then split those. The function was several lines long and worked a treat….
buuuuuut
I found a better way and thought I would share it with you.
Regular Expressions to the rescue!
$cardbody=preg_replace('/(\S{55})\S/','$1 ',$cardbody);
This expression looks for a line of 55 non whitespace characters and if there is a 56th non whitespace character the text is replaced with the original 55 characters and the 56th is changed to a “space”. When this is output within HTML, the text will wrap with a line length of 55 characters.
(As a later update, it may be more appropriate to apply the above filter when outputting the text to HTML).
That brings me to another awesome firefox plugin : “Regular Expressions Tester” A really useful tool to experiment with regular expressions. Type in a sample paragraph or two, and a quick change of the regular expression gives you an instant update to the affect it has.
Tags: PHP
Posted in Web Development | No Comments »
November 13th, 2009
It’s Friday the 13th, and unless something goes wrong in 30 minutes I’ve got away with it. The day has passed without a hard drive failure, or anything else causing a problem. But if it did I know that the important stuff is stored away in a safe place.
Imagine for a second, that the next time you sit at your PC to view some of your family photos, they seam to have developed some funky lines, or odd blocks of colours caused by data corruption. May be your PC will simply fail to read any data from the disk and you’ll be left with a black screen and a message; “Failed to read from Boot disk”.
With an every increasing choice of back up methods, you really have no excuse for not duplicating that important data.
Hardware
The choices are small – either DVD disk or Hard drive. I favour the hard drive as in my experience DVDs may not always be usable after storing for a long time. The DVD backups I have usually have a few copies of each file, on different disks, so if one fails, I have a backup of a backup.
My preferred backup method is the hard drive. Before the days of external USB drives I stored data on a drive connected internally, then would pack it away in a box.
You now have a choice of external drive either USB or Ethernet. I have a few external USB drives of various sizes. I connect one at least once a week to make sure my important files are duplicated.
Software
Usually I just copy files from one drive to another. Can’t get much simpler than that, but more recently I have reviewed several backup applications that take control and do the boring task of copying those files. I just make sure the drive is switched on when the backup program starts.
The software that I have chosen to be the best of the bunch is Syncback Pro (Currently version 5.8).
Checkout the Features Page, download the trial, and add a great application to your PC.
Tags: Backup
Posted in Hardware, Software | No Comments »
November 12th, 2009
I have been creating web pages for many years and have used many high priced professional applications to aid in the developement of structured, standards compliant sites.
Step up FIREBUG – this IS the very best HTML/CSS troubleshooting tool.
Firebug is a plugin for firefox, one of many plugins that extends the features of firefox.
If you are just starting out and are interested in the creation of HTML/XHTML pages, firebug will allow you to view the structure of the current page. So when you see an awesome page while surfing the web, you can click the Firebug button and up pops a window which displays all the page structure – DIVS / CSS / Javascript and you can examine the techniques used.
Firebug allows changes to be made to the markup and instantly shows the results. Allowing you to tweak the code.
If you are working with templates, like this one that I created for PCMagyk for the WordPress package, firebug is invaluable for tweaking the stylesheets. Go visit the page for a full feature list and screen shots of what to expect.
When you are familiar with firebug, there are more firefox extensions that extend firebug;
Firecookie ~ Cookie manager
FireDiff ~ Tracks changes
Firefinder for firebug ~Finds HTML elements matching CSS selectors
Codeburner ~ HTML/CSS reference material
FireRainbow ~ Javascript syntax highlighting
Grab some Firefox Extensions
Tags: CSS, Firefox
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November 12th, 2009
Unless you are living in the woods you must have heard of firefox, but have you taken the time to try it out?
If not, then pleeeeease don’t tell me you are still using Internet Explorer. For many years Internet Explorer has been the rats ass of browsers. A demonstration of poor software design, poor security, poor performance, poor standards and a real headache for anyone who wants to create pages for the web.
Internet Explorer should have been, and should BE the pinnacle of software creation, Microsoft’s showcase application to demonstrate the companies quality, abillity and commitment to giving the customers the best.
It’s too late…
Firefox is gaining ground every day, but who cares about the numbers? Internet Explorer has the advantage, it comes with the operation system. (That appears to have changed with Windows 7).
So don’t wait any long, go and get Firefox now!
It will look slightly different, take a little bit of time to find the bookmarks and other features, and start surfing the net safer..
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Tags: Firefox
Posted in Software | No Comments »
November 11th, 2009
Here’s a cheat sheet to help you with CSS shorthand. Defaault values are noted in [brackets]
background: {
background-color: color | #hex | (rgb / % | 0-255); [transparent]
background-image:url(URI); [none]
background-repeat: repeat | repeat-x | repeat-y | no-repeat; [repeat]
background-position: X Y | (top|bottom|center) (left|right|center); [top left]
background-attachment: scroll | fixed; [scroll]
}
font {
font-style: normal | italic | oblique; [normal]
font-variant:normal | small-caps; [normal]
font-weight: normal | bold | bolder | lighter | (100-900); [normal]
font-size: (number+unit) | (xx-small – xx-large); [inherit]
line-height: normal | (number+unit); [normal]
font-family:name,”more names”; [inherit]
}
border {
border-width: number+unit;
border-style: solid | dotted | dashed | inset | outset (etc);
border-color: color | #hex | (rgb / % | 0-255);
}
list-style {
list-style-type: (numerous); [disc]
list-style-position:inside | outside; [outside]
list-style-image:url(image.png); [none]
}
margin/padding {
number+unit (top right bottom left)
}
Tags: CSS
Posted in Web Development | No Comments »