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Developer Toolbox: Best Firefox Plugin Ever – Read It Later

November 3, 2008 by Jim · 1 Comment 

I’m always surfing the web and often times I’ll see something that I don’t have time to read so what to do?  Bookmark it?  Then I can’t access it from home?  Add it to delicious? That quickly becomes a mess.

Recently I found a cool extension that was designed just for this – Read It Later.

This Firefox extension allows you to save pages of interest to read later. It eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest. A commenter below (Chris) summed it up very well: “It’s a ’staging area’ for bookmarks.”

I’ve been using it for awhile with great success and recently they added the killer feature – integration with Google Reader!  So now I can easily mark something to read later from within Google Reader. Sweet!

This video is a nice introduction…

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Developer Toolbox – Scribe: Save Form Data

January 28, 2008 by Jim · 3 Comments 

Scribe Today’s tool is another Firefox extension – Scribe. Scribe simply allows you to save your form information. Fill out the form, select File > Save Entry and it will prompt you for a location and file name. Save the file. Now when you re-open the form you can click File > Open Entry, select your previously saved file and your fields will be filled out!

I use this all the time when developing forms. It’s a huge time saver to be able to fill out a form once, save the data, and then quickly be able to fill out the form over and over again in development.

Unfortunately this extension seems to have been abandoned. It will not install correctly in newer releases of Firefox without a bit of hacking…

  1. Download the scribe.xpi file
  2. Raname the file: scribe.zip
  3. Uncompress it using whatever tool you prefer – I like 7zip
  4. Open install.rdf
  5. Scroll down to about line 16
  6. Change the line: 1.0
  7. To something like: 3.0
  8. Save the file
  9. Rename it back to scribe.xpi
  10. Drag and drop into a Firefox window
  11. The installer should run and the extension will be installed

I’m currently running this on WinXP with the latest release of Firefox with no issues.

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Developer Toolbox – AutoFill Forms

January 17, 2008 by Jim · Leave a Comment 

AutoFillForm How many times a day do you fill out our old friend the blog comment form? If you are like me – a lot. Do you type all that stuff in each time? If you do you should grab the AutoFill Forms extension.

Autofill Forms enables you to fill out web forms with one click or a keyboard shortcut. A set of customizable rules is used to determine the input for each form element. You are able to edit, remove, enable/disable the provided rules and to add your own ones. You can configure the order in which the rules are to be applied and define site specific rules.

AutoFill Forms Preferences First install the extension. Then simply open the Preferences and fill out your data. You can enter common things like first and last name, your address, email, username, or add your own rules. You can have multiple profiles setup. One for blog forms, one for shopping carts, etc. Clicking the Advanced tab allows you to set the keyboard shortcut, Alt+J by default.

Once you have your profile created – anytime you see a form – simply hit Alt+J and it will be filled out!! Occasionally you hit the odd form that doesn’t use common names but I find that the majority work on the first shot.

I have also used this to hold form data for testing so I can quickly fill out an applications form while under development.

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Developer Toolbox – Web Developer Toolbar

January 16, 2008 by Jim · 2 Comments 

What is the one application you probably have open more than any other? Your browser! I know my browser is open 24×7. I’m testing my application, watching the news, reading blogs, etc. As a developer your browser is one of the most important tools in your toolbox. If you haven’t explored the current browsers and the vast number of ‘extensions’ or plugins available you are hurting your development!

In the next few Developer Toolbox posts I’ll cover some of my favorite Firefox add-ons. There are also plugins available for Internet Explorer and Opera although not nearly as many as available for Firefox.

The extension I use all the time is the Web Developer toolbar.

WebDeveloper live CSS edit Every time I use the WebDeveloper toolbar I find something new. Or I’ll read about someone touting some bit of software and say “that’s in the Web Developer toolbar!”. Today Sean Corfield mentioned a CSS editor that allowed you to do real time edits to any website. You can do that with the WebDeveloper toolbar! Click CSS > Edit CSS (or CTRL+Shift+E) and a small dialog box will open at the bottom of your browser with the site’s CSS loaded. Edit away and in real-time your changes will be visible! I fixed up Sean’s site which I thought needed a bit of color! :)

Web Developer Ruler I also saw MeasureIt (a ruler plugin) making the rounds on the blogs this week. If you do a lot of design – I’d probably install MeasureIt as it has a lot of neat features but for developers who don’t do a lot of design, the Web Developer toolbar includes a nice ruler itself giving you height, width and the position on the page. It also provides a handy “Line Guides” which is useful if you are trying to line something up.

If you don’t already have it installed do it now and go exploring! Also make sure to check out the preferences as there are lots of options you can set there. I have added a lot of screen resolutions, switched it to use Notepad++ as my view source editor, and added a few additional validation tools.

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