PiXELWiT

I've mentioned my fondness for FireFox FireBug before so when I read about the 5 Best FireBug Plugins I knew I had to share the news. It seems FireBug is popular enough to warrant its own subset of "plugins" or "extensions". Nifty.

Out of the 5 available plugins:

• YSlow: Creates a report grading the speed of any site.
• FireCookie: Lets you inspect and modify the cookies a site is using.
• FirePHP: A PHP Debugging tool used to examine PHP header data.
• PixelPerfect:Overlays a transparent image guide to help tweak CSS.
• Rainbow: Color coding for scripts inside FireBug.

I found YSlow from Yahoo! to be the most interesting. YSlow uses 13 rules to grade your page's performance and presents the results in a well-formatted series of tabbed views. When combined with the information found in Yahoo!'s Best Practices for High Performance Web Sites this FireBug plugin will definitely help you understand why your page is loading slowly.

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After reading my last article, you might think that I've abandoned reading RSS feeds altogether due to my concern with "shadowy librarian spies" but that's definitely not the case. In fact I have quick, easy and anonymous access to a comprehensive list of Flash feeds ready to read the very moment I feel the urge to monitor the Flash-O-Sphere's heartbeat. All I have to do is Read Somebody Else's Feeds. That particular feed list happens to belong to Neil Webb and I have to admit, it covers just about everything I'm interested in and a good deal more.

One of the best aspects of reading other people's feeds is that you don't even have to lift a finger to create or maintain the list and the web interface is so simple all you have to do is point and click, no tagging, sorting, or signing-up is required... simple and easy, the way the web was meant to be.

Of course there is a downside ...
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