Web Guru Tools

Thanks to Firefox and great add-ons that have been designed for it, your browser is your best friend when it comes to web site development.  From CSS tools, to advertising your domain, here are 10 of the most popular web designer tools for Firefox.

•FireFTP – Looking for an FTP client you can reach from inside of Firefox?  FireFTP is a free, secure, cross platform FTP client built into and for Firefox.

•Picnik – Get quick access to your own online image editor with.  It adds a menu option to import images right into the Picnik online image editor.

•Stylish –often considered for web site tweakers, however it can also be used to add or remove CSS and design elements on the fly, without even having to login to your web site.

•User Agent Switcher – Another good one to have for cross browser testing.  It adds a menu to the toolbar so you can quickly change the user agent of the browser.

•FireShot – Take a screenshot and also add notes to it.  If you want to highlight key features of a design to a client, there is no better Firefox add-on.

•SeoQuake – Aimed at the search engine optimization crowd, this extension helps webmasters deal with the promotion of their domains.

Always just a keystroke away, Firebug never gets in your way. You can open Firebug in a separate window, or as a bar at the bottom of your browser. Firebug offers you fine-grained control over which websites you want to enable it for. Firebug makes it easy to locate HTML elements buried deep in the page. When you’ve found what you’re looking for, Firebug gives you a wealth of information, and lets you edit the HTML live.

Firebug’s CSS tabs tell you all you need to know about the styles in your web pages. If you don’t care for what it’s telling you, you can make changes and see them take effect on the spot. When your CSS boxes aren’t lining up correctly you certainly want to know why. Let Firebug be your eyes and it will measure and highlight all the offsets, margins, borders, padding, and sizes for you. Your pages are taking way to long to load, but why? Did you write too much JavaScript? Did you forget to compress your images?  Firebug breaks it all down for you file-by-file. When things aren’t going right, Firebug lets you know immediately and gives you detailed and useful information about errors in JavaScript, CSS, and XML.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) advises us all to make sure our transactions — online and off — are secure and our personal information is protected. The FTC offers these tips to encourage you to manage your personal information wisely, and to help lower its misuse.

Before you give any personally identifying information, find out how it will be used and if it will be shared with others. Ask about privacy polices: do you have a choice about the use of your information; can you choose to have it kept confidential? Read the privacy policy on any website that is directed to children. Websites directed to children or that knowingly collect information from kids under 13 must post a notice of their information collection practices.

Put passwords on your all your accounts, including your credit card account, and your bank and phone accounts. Avoid using typical information — like your mother’s maiden name, your birth date, the last four digits of your SSN, or your phone number — or obvious choices, like a series of consecutive numbers or your hometown football team. Don’t put all your identifying information in one holder in your purse, briefcase, or backpack.

1.Firebug–a very versatile tool. Allows ability to see html source code in formatted manner. See style sheet applied every element in the webpage, also all the ajax request headers.

2.Measure It–It allows you to measure the width and height of any area in the webpage.

3.ColorZilla–a color picker tool that is available for Firefox.

4.Web developer Tool bar–use this to disabling js, css images etc to mimic various conditions. You can read and delete cookies, clear caches, enable or disable form elements and lot of other things.

5.Del.icio.us Bookmarks–After all those book marks are all the references collected from the web that are related to web development activities.

6.YSlow–this is a plugin from yahoo. It helps analyze the speed of a website as per yahoo’s recommendations for optimization.

7.Screengrab & FireShot–FireShot provides the features to added notes without opening any image editor. This is the one feature you will fall in love with.

8.IE Developer Tool bar–a combination of firebug+web developer toolbar+colorzilla and measure it, but for Internet Explorer.

9.Delicious Button for Internet Explorer–everyone should have easy access to Delicious on every browser.

10.DebugBar–grab screen shot’s of the website and color picker via toolbar on top.

There has been much debate over the privacy that is offered on the internet. With so much information available on the internet, how do you determine if the information that you are providing to various companies through the internet is truly safe or protected? It is important to be aware of the privacy policies

To really determine the level of privacy that you are being offered on the internet you must determine the privacy for each website that you frequent. Determining the level of the privacy can assist you through the reading of the disclaimer to really learn how well your information is protected through the websites that you choose to visit.

You may have heard about the recent hotmail scandal that included a specific URL that allowed anyone to see another’s inbox as long as they were aware of the username. Although this is one of the privacy breaches that we hear about, there are many that we do not. There are many security breaches that we are not aware of and there is much private information being shared with others on a daily basis.

Can you truly use the internet with the expectation of privacy? Think about the information that you are providing to various companies on a daily basis and how much of your life you are sharing with the people that you have never met. The next time that you are entering your personal information, examine the privacy statement of the website to ensure that your information is truly protected.