PiXELWiT » Firefox

CPAUG July 30th Meeting

Pixelwit — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 06:17:13 +0000

I must preface this post by stating, “I suck at remembering names.”

So having said that…

To the guy to my left who uses Photoshop to do HTML layouts but doesn’t have a laptop:
1. I don’t know if you use FireFox and FireBug plugins but you might be interested in the PixelPerfect plugin.
2. People mentioned FireWorks so I thought I’d throw in a link to an Adobe article discussing Photoshop and FireWorks integration.
3. And when talking about FireWorks I always like to mention Senocular’s work.
To the guy to my right with the Treo:
1. I’m looking for some mobile techno devices and checking out everything I can.
2. Thanks for tolerating my questions/grilling.
To the guy who wants to sell PDFs as e-Books:
1. Adobe just happens to have a PDF called “How to Create Adobe PDF eBooks“.
2. You could skip the PDF entirely and just convert Quark to eBook.
3. If you want to go the EXE route, you can have Quark export to HTML and try some eBook Compiler software like Activ E-Book Compiler
To our group leader Megan (1 of the names I actually remember):
- Thanks for mentioning my site.
- And most importantly, thanks for the cookie.

FireFox FireBug Plugins

Pixelwit — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:22:04 +0000

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.

Context Search Plugin for FireFox

Pixelwit — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 12:52:36 +0000

Results from a previous poll indicate that very few PixelWit.com visitors use a toolbar when browsing. I don’t use one either, but there’s one FireFox plugin that I absolutely have to have. It’s called Context Search and I like it so much that it’s the first FireFox plugin that I reinstall after a catastrophic hard drive failure. This simple little (9k) tool helps you easily research terms found within a web page.

Here’s how it works, let’s say you’re minding your own business, reading your favorite blog, when all of a sudden, WHAM! you run into an unfamiliar word like “apoptosis”. Quick, what do you do?...

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Feed Reading Options

Pixelwit — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:23:15 +0000

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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FireBug is Way Handy

Pixelwit — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 23:19:26 +0000

I’m not a big-time web developer so I’m often a bit behind the curve when it comes to cool new tools. If you’re like me and you happened to miss the seemingly omnipresent buzz, Firebug is one of the few web development tools worthy of the praise heaped upon it. It has so many features it’s easy to be overwhelmed by them all. I don’t claim to know everything about this Firefox plugin, but one thing I know how to do is use Firebug to edit CSS right inside the browser. Not only that,...

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