‘computing’ Category

Firefox

I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about web browsers. I’m pretty committed to Firefox. Internet Explorer is just not a feasible option for a variety of reasons. I’ve tried Safari and don’t like it. Opera seems pretty good and feels faster on my Mac than Firefox, but I don’t have the motivation to research whether it will do everything I want (yet).

Since I do a fair amount of web development these days, I have a number of Firefox add-ons installed, so I thought I’d make a list.

	Aardvark Lets you delete or isolate page elements. Great for cleaning up a page prior to printing.
	Firebug Indispensable web development tool. Edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
	Google Toolbar Has many features, but I use it to access my bookmarks from any computer.
	Greasemonkey User scripting language to customize the way web pages look and function. I use it to make the Blogger.com post editor much larger.
	Live HTTP Headers View HTTP transactions while a page is loading.
	Mouse Gestures Execute common browser commands (like “back”) by gesturing with the mouse.
	View Source Chart Draws a color-coded chart of a web page’s source code and structure.
	Web Developer Adds a menu and toolbar with various web development tools.

I also use the GrApple(UNO) custom theme to make Firefox blend in better with the other programs on my Mac.

LRR Site

So now that I’m done with the vacation journal and photo work, I can catch up here on some other things that have been going on. Over the last couple months I’ve been working on re-designing the Lab Rescue web site, and completed the work a couple weeks ago. You can see the results at www.lrr.org. I think it looks much better than my previous version of the site that’s looked pretty much the same for the last few years. You can see the old version here for a short time until I take it down for good.

Inspiration and tools for the new look came from a variety of places, including:

• The book, The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
• Stylegala’s gallery of web site designs
• GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program
• WellStyled.com’s Color Scheme Generator
• Colors on the Web’s Color Wizard
• Typetester to compare screen fonts, styles, and colors
• The Octopus Engine for shaded, rounded corners
• The Details are in the Symbol Fonts, from “Ask the CSS Guy”
• Showing Hyperlink Cues with CSS, from “Ask the CSS Guy”
• Position Is Everything, for tips on dealing with MSIE bugs
• BarelyFitz’s Learn CSS Positioning in Ten Steps makes a confusing topic quite simple