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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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! :)

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.