Sometimes, it’s very difficult to be a web developer. Not only you have to worry about finances, like web hosting costs, but you have to focus on driving traffic to your site, and as much as possible make sure your community grows. Well, today, I’m going to recommend five Firefox add-ons that will make your life as a web developer a little bit easier.
1) ColorZilla
Let’s say you really love a color scheme of your favorite website. You love it so much, that you want to implement the same color scheme for your own site. Unfortunately for you, you have no clue how to figure out what’s the RGB color or HTML color code. That will soon change with the Firefox add-on, ColorZilla. ColorZilla allows you to obtain a HTML or RGB value of an object on any website.
Great, but, it doesn’t end there! You can Zoom the web page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the web page. The DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily.
This has to be one of the greatest Firefox add-on designed especially for web designers!
2) Measure It
Measure It is another great Firefox add-on for web developers especially those new to developing websites. Let’s say, you would like to create a banner for your site, but you have no idea what’s the standard dimensions of a web banner (like me 10 years ago perhaps). So what should you do? Panic and freak out? No! I’ll tell you what you need to do! You’re simply need to measure the standard dimensions of another website’s banner.
The Measure It addon for Firefox allows website developers to measure anything on a web page. Maybe you want to measure another website’s banner, or a website’s ad space. Maybe weird enough, you just want to measure their search bar! Whatever you want to measure, the Measure It add-on will be there for you!
3) Scribefire
Let’s say that you found something interesting on the Internet (news, videos, articles and etc.) and you want to share it with your blog readers. Instead of opening up a new browser window, browsing to your blog’s login page, click on the Write a post link and etc before you can start writing, why not take the fast route? What’s the fast route? Blog from within ScribeFire!
ScribeFire is another awesome Firefox web developer (or more precisely “blogger”) add-on which allows users to easily drag and drop text from the web page into their blog, post entries, take notes, and even optimize their ad inventory, directly through the Firefox browser. Like I said, the fast way of blogging! Setting up your blog to use the add-on is extremely easy, and won’t take that much effort too. When I installed it for my blog, it took me only two minutes for the whole thing to be setup. Right now, blogging platforms that support ScribeFire include WordPress, Blogger, Livejournal, Myspace, and plenty more. But, you know what’s the best part? They are releasing a brand new Quick Ads program that could give you some extra cash! 🙂
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com has this to say “…a lot of bloggers swear by it.”
4) FireFTP
Let’s face it, using the FTP program in Windows sucks! No matter how many times you set the right username and password, they keep asking for the “correct” information! Not to mention the command line FTP program where you need to type and every command manually… ah, that’s painful.
Of course, there are plenty of FTP programs which you can use to replace those in Windows. FireFTP is one of them! FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Firefox that provides easy access to your FTP server! I’ve been using FireFTP for some time and I must say it’s really easy to access your website using this add-on.
Let’s take a look at some of FireFTP’s features:
- Synchronization: Keep directories in sync while navigating
- Automatic reconnect and resuming of transfers
- Directory Comparison: Compare directory content (compares subdirectories too!)
- International: Available in over 20 languages
- Search/Filtering
- Character Set Support: UTF8 and just about any other character encoding supported
- Export/Import accounts
- Integrity Checks of transfers (XMD5, XSHA1)
- File Hashing: Generate hashes of files (MD5, various SHA’s)
- Remote Editing
- Drag & Drop
…and a whole lot more… it does some commercial FTP clients cannot do!
5) TwitterFox
Today’s web developer finally realize the potential of Twitter, another social site which doubles as a micro-blogging service. Twitter’s users can send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. This free service is one of the most happening invention this century… as of July 2008, it has over 2,200,000 accounts registered!
Let’s look at Twitter’s FireFox add-on, which is appropriately called TwitterFox. TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ statuses on Twitter. Other than that it can automatically post Twitter messages to your Twitter page, send public messages to other Twitter users and of course including private Twitter messages. With this great extension/add-on, most likely you will never find the need to visit your Twitter page ever again!
Thanks for the freeware community. All the above are free to use… they may not be much, but they can certainly help us to help make our life a little easier, especially on the Internet. 🙂