The Firefox web developer extension is a Firefox plugin every webdeveloper should have. I just read on 456 Berea Street the good news that version 1.0 has been released. Many new features have been added, and the menus have also been improved (History).
Using HTML and CSS in a correct way, validated, and semantically and structurally correct, has a lot of benefits over ‘old style html’: faster and smaller pages, better results in search engines, easier to maintain, beter cross browser support, improved reusability, and better accessibility. Enough reason to start writing valid html code and use CSS for presentation.
One book which really helps you use XHTML and CSS is Bulletproof Web Design. Kathy Sierra blogs that another good book is now available: Head First HTML/CSS finally ships! I haven’t read the Head First HTML/CSS yet, but i do have three other books in this series: Head First Java, Head First Design Patterns and Head First Servlets and JSP. These are all excellent books, so this new books on HTML and CSS is probably also going to usefull.
As you probably know by now, Firefox 1.5 has been released. Even the mainstream media is reporting on this new version. The only thing i want to add here is that it includes a fix for the bug that was causing a problem with the menu’s on the IT-eye website. Good to see that fixed. Other improvements include: improved popup blocker, automatic download of updates and support for svg.
One of the reasons I use Firefox is it’s web developer extension. It’s pretty hard to develop webpages without it. Last week Microsoft released a similar plugin for Internet explorer: Internet Explorer developer plugin. It’s actually a combination of the web developer extension and Firefox’s DOM Inspector. Good news for people stuck on Internet Explorer. Here’s a screenshot:
I’m currently reading Scott Berkun’s book The Art of Project Management. Scott was a project manager at Microsoft for many years. While working for Microsoft he also worked on the Internet explorer project, so it’s pretty interesting that he switched to Firefox. Read his blog: Why I switched to Firefox. Btw, I haven’t finished reading his book yet, but so far I can recommend it.
Google has just launches a blog search service: Google Blog Search. Interesting to know is that according to Google Launches Industrial Strength Blog Search Google Blog Search only indexes content it finds in feeds. So if you publish only excerpts in your feed (I think this is what we do for the it-eye weblog), only the excerpt will be indexed. This is plenty reason to either publish your full post in your feed, or to put all the important keywords in your excerpt. You can get the Google Blog Search results as a feed, so you can for example subscribe to the 10 latest blog results for the keywords oracle and adf (atom feed).
Another website of interest is tech.memeorandum. This website lists the most blogged about technology news items. If you want to know what’s hot in the blogosphere, just surf to tech.memeorandum. They also have a website for political weblogs: memeorandum.
Eddie Awad has created a plugin for Firefox which lets you search the Oracle documentation. Read his posting: Oracle Firefox search plugin. Have a look at the plugin, adding a search engine to Firefox is amazingly simple. It’s not even a real plugin, it’s just some lines of javascript code.