I like these “Best” lists that you find on blogs, so I thought I should at least start contributing my own. And to begin with, my own list of swizzy Firefox add-ons that will help the humble developer.  They’re all Firefox 3 compatible and they’re all free.

In no particular order (other than, erm, alphabetical. Which is an order)…

Firebug
A Yahoo provided plug-in that allows you to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. Once installed you can couple this with YSlow, a plugin for Firebug, which puts into practise Yahoo’s very own website performance principles – displaying how well the page does and providing a breakdown into what makes up the page download.

IE Tab
With a click of an icon you can switch Firefox’s rendering engine to IE and back again. Useful for those quick cross-browser tests.

LinkChecker
This scans the current web page and highlights each link it finds according to whether it was valid or not – a great way to quickly check link validity on a page.

Live HTTP headers
Allows you to see the header information sent by a web page – particularly handy for checking on compression, caching, cookies and the like.

MeasureIt
This is a quick and simple measurement tool. Normally, I’d recommend standalone apps for this kind of thing so they’re not restricted to the browser, but this does this particular job so well, it’s still a requirement.

RankChecker
When it’s time to keep an eye on your SEO, this is invaluable. You type your chosen search terms into the RankChecker screen and it will display, for a number of popular search engines, where your site came in the results. Great for monitoring whether your SEO is working or not.

Screen grab!
This does a single job but, god, does it well. It takes screen shots from the browser. You can either take an area, the current visible portion or the whole page (whether currently on screen or not). You can then save the results or stick it on your clipboard.

SEO For Firefox
This displays various SEO information about the site – PageRank, links, etc

Split Browser
This is a new one that I’ve come across when I had a specific requirement. Basically, this lets you split the Firefox screen into multiple “windows” into which you can load different pages. In my case I found this invaluable when comparing two pages side-by-side (an existing version of a website and a new, modified version).

Web Developer
What more can be said about this? If you could only have one add-on, this should be it, with links and tools to everything you could imagine. My most-used part of it is the ability to switch off web page components, such as JavaScript and images. Brilliant.

I use Googles Adsense for some of my websites to generate a little revenue. For reasons that are now lost on me, I signed up with a non-Google email address. I then tried to use my Google account later only for it to turned down because, well, I already had an Adsense account. All very true.

Now, Google are desperately trying to get Adsense users to sign in with a Google email address. Fine, they even get you a nice wizard to transfer it over. Except it won’t let me as my Google Mail account is associated with a turned down Adsense account. Which it is.

And I’ve sent various mails to Google asking them how I can get around this. Their only solution is for me to set up ANOTHER Google mail account. Which I don’t want to do. And I know that, given time, they’ll force me into using Google mail for Adsense.

How can they not disassociate my account with my previous Adsense attempt? They’re Google. It’s their software. How can that be difficult?

I love Google but sometimes…

I’ve talked before about the excellent PHP Speedy application – both a PHP script for your website or a WordPress plugin. However, as with all apps of this type, it doesn’t always “play ball” with everything.

In this case, I use the Lightbox 2 plugin for WordPress and, well, PHP Speedy has a tendency to break it.

So, having spoke with Leon at Aciddrop, I have the following fixes (this works on the current 1.8.2 version of Lightbox 2).

First of all, find the following line in lightbox.php:

$lightboxscript.= "<script type=\"text/javascript\" src=\"".$lightbox_path."js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects,builder\"></script>\n";

Replace this with:

$lightboxscript.= "<script type=\"text/javascript\" src=\"".$lightbox_path."js/effects.js\"></script>\n";
$lightboxscript.= "<script type=\"text/javascript\" src=\"".$lightbox_path."js/builder.js\"></script>\n";

Next, open up lightbox.js and before any of the code, add the line:

lb_path = "http://www.artiss.co.uk/wp-content/plugins/lightbox-2-wordpress-plugin/lightbox/";

Obviously, you will need to change the path to wherever your lightbox folder is.

And then, as if by magic, all should work. If you find that photos appear but without any buttons, then it’s the second fix (the one to lightbox,js) that fixes this, so look again at this. If the change to lightbox.php doesn’t work then, well, the lightbox won’t work at all (the picture will simply be displayed normally).

Hopefully, this might help someone