Another Rant From “Lefty”

Among the variety of things I do, I dabble in web design (not for others, but to support my own efforts). I do most of my implementation in Dreamweaver CS4, which I’ve used since it was “GoLive Studio”, but there are a number of browser-based support tools available for Firefox that can be terrifically helpful.

MeasureIt: Sometimes—as with creating Twitter backgrounds—you need to live within constraints that aren’t of your own making. You can guess-timate, or trial-and-error your way through, but having a nice ruler you can use on Joe Random Website to see how big things are and how far away they are from one another is a lot easier, and less time-consuming. MeasureIt gives you a button in the lower left-hand corner of your browser frame that, when clicked, provides what amounts to a two-dimensional “ruler” that will give you measurement in pixels, points, and other units. Download MeasureIt from here.

Web Developer: The Web Developer extension is made of gold and awesome. It gives you a tool bar and menu which let you do everything from manipulate and view CSS, to working with images, forms and cookies, to validation tools, and a ton of other stuff besides. You need this extension. Download it from here.

FireBug & FirePHP: If you’ve got a PHP site, you know the pain of debugging such stuff. FireBug duplicates much of the functionality of Web Developer (in a perhaps slightly less convenient console form), but adds a network activity monitor, a Javascript debugger and some other cool toys. Where it really shines is when you add FirePHP, an extension aimed at AJAX development, which lets you insert method calls in your remote code to provide information which is displayed on FireBug’s console. Get FireBug from here, and FirePHP from here. (FirePHP requires FireBug as a prerequisite.)

There are a lot of terrific tools and plug-ins for FireFox, and that’s one of its greatest strengths: don’t like what it does, or need it to do more or different? You can, and thankfully, a bunch of talented folks have. We all benefit from their interest and hard work. Thanks to Christoph Dorn (FirePHP), Parakey, Inc. (FireBug), Chris Pederick (Web Developer) and Kevin Freitas (MeasureIt)!

These tools can make your web design and development life a lot easier. Try ‘em out and let me know what you think.

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