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Must have extensions for Firefox

Other than WordPress, Firefox is one our favorite open source products because it’s a fast and stable web browser. We prefer it to Internet Explorer on Windows because of the wealth of extensions aka plugins available for it.

Here’s our collection of favorite Firefox extensions aka plugins to save you a lot of time when you’re trying to collect or share information or if you happen to be the CEO and webmaster of your startup and need to fine tune and debug your WordPress site.

So these plugins can be organized into two broad categories:  On the top of the Firefox browser toolbar are information collection and sharing . The bottom of the browser (status bar area) hold the design and development tools.

On the top left is Evernote, a multi-platform cloud based note taking system. With the Firefox plugin, you can quickly clip the contents of any web page into your Evernote account. Evernote is available as a web application and also as a dedicated app for virtually every device out there so you can read your notes almost anywhere.

Then’s there’s Delicious, which is a cloud based social bookmarking service. Bookmark, tag, and write down notes for each web site you’ll want to look up later.  Note that Delicious maybe jettisoned soon by parent company Yahoo, you can still export the bookmarks at anytime for now. A possible (paid) alternative is Pinboard but it’s currently without a Firefox plugin.

You can use Goo.gl Lite toolbar add-on to quickly generate a “Goo.gl” (Google’s shortener service) URL of the current page. With one click on it save the current URL to your clipboard immediately.

Email This lets you quickly launch your email client including web based Gmail to quickly send the current page to someone.

Try the amazing Fox to Phone, which will launch the current page from your desktop Firefox onto your Andorid device web browser with minimal intervention. Install the Firefox extension and download the companion app in the Android marketplace. If you’re on an iPhone, try out Firefox Home which will sync your browsing history, local bookmarks, and tabs on your iPhone.

On the bottom are design and development tools:
From left to right, we’ll start with MeasureIt, which lets your measure the pixels by drawing rectangles on the current web page. It’s really useful if you trying to shift pixels around a page.

Want to grab the color value (RGB or Hex) of any web page object/component without snapshoting the screen and pasting it into Photoshop? Try Colorzilla.

Want to write something about the page you’re looking at without opening up WordPress admin? Try ScribeFire. Read my quick review.

If you’re constantly making changes to a single page and want to clear the web browser cache with one quick click? Try Cache Status.

Want to grab a screenshot of the entire web page even if it’s taller than your current monitor resolution? Try Screengrab.

Want to see how your page looks like at 1024×768 resolution or other monitor size without resizing your OS resolution? Try Firesizer.

And finally one of the most popular and useful Firefox extensions of all time, use Firebug to help you debug HTML, CSS, and Javascript. You can use it in a combination with Y!Slow to speed up your web pages.

Summarized list
Information collection and sharing: 
Evernote, Delicious, Goo.gl Lite, Email This, Fox to Phone, Firefox Home

Design tools: 
MeasureIt, Colorzilla, ScribeFire, Cache Status, Screengrab, Firesizer, Firebug, Y!Slow

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New WordPress.com theme showcase

Looking for more cool WordPress themes? Check out WordPress.com’s new Theme Showcase for their hosted service. While you won’t be able to download the themes directly for your self hosted WP site, you can Google it to find the download link. You may recognize a lot of the themes but there will be a few new surprises! I like that they’ve started to categorize the features and layout of each theme better. Hopefully this will also trickle down to WP.org’s theme gallery.

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W3 Total Cache: Tips

We’ve mentioned W3 Total Cache before as one of our favorites WP plugins and no doubt it has a ton of options. One of the most confusing things is the “preview” mode. Once you’ve setup the configuration including enabling and disabling modules, how does one get out of preview mode and “go live?” Not as intuitive as one would think…just click on the “disable” button in the preview module. After going live, make sure to clear all your cache files.

I wish the designers of W3TC did a better job of “going live” with a simple button rather than having to “disable” preview mode.

Also here’s a great in-depth guide to W3TC at Zemalf.com.

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DIY CDN (or load balancing) for WordPress

Here’s sort of a part 2 to our previous “Speed up your WordPress site” post. Admittedly, it’s not quite your own CDN (Content Delivery Network) but the idea is similar: automatically copy data to other virtual server URLs so your page data can load in parallel. How could one do this? There’s a plugin for that – it’s called WP Parallel Loading System. According to the plugin author, your browser will only allow 2 concurrent connections from the same URL on a page. This plugin will off load data to a new URL that you’ve setup and should re-code your pages to automatically pull the content from there.

You’ll need to be versed in your web host company’s control panel (like cPanel or Plesk) to setup virtual sub-domains but other than that it seems pretty straight forward. Theoretically if you have accounts at other web hosting provider, you could have sub-domains setup there too. Anyone tried this and any good (or bad) results?

Get it: WP Parallel Loading System

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WP theme as malware?

Just when you thought it was safe to download randomly found WordPress themes, we run across a report at OttoPress of a dodgy site called “top-themes.com” that’s offering themes that could turn your WP site into a remote-controlled automated link spamming tool. This might be a good argument to only use trusted theme providers like WordPress.org or Wufoo.

Speaking of security, be sure to update your WP to v3.0.3,  (and yep it came out pretty quickly right after v3.0.2).

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Keep track of all your WP sites with a dashboard

If you’re a hardcore WP proponent with a lot of WordPress sites under your control, WP Status Dashboard can help you keep an eye on them. This self installed app can display all your WP site status on single page with the following stats: search engine indexable status, WordPress version, and number of plugin updates available. You could make this dashboard page one of your default browser home pages every time you launch your web browser.

This app costs $20 at CodeCanyon. It requires a bit of technical knowledge – you’ll need to know how to setup a MySQL database file. It’s too bad that this app itself is not built with WP to make it really easy to use.

Get it: WP Status Dashboard

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Great visual tools for communicating with clients

I know this post isn’t WP related but if you’re doing a lot of web design work, using either app mentioned below could save you a ton of time…

You’ve probably heard the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words”? If you and your client just can’t get on the same page using email or even voice communication, why not try using a visual mark-up tool like Skitch or Jing? Skitch is a Mac-only tool that let’s you quickly snapshot your screen, draw arrows, write up annotation/notes, and publish to a web page very, very quickly. How quickly? Well how about under a minute start to finish?  Skitch has been in beta for almost 2 years and they’ve finally released “v1.0” that’s even more polished and better that I ponied up $15 for one year of “pro” features.

How about Jing? Jing’s advantage is that it captures up to 5 minutes of your on-screen activity and you can record your voice during the capture to annotate it. Jing’s also has a cross platform – it works on both Mac and Windows. Like Skitch, I paid for the pro version for $15/year. The only draw back is that Jing’s workflow is not as quick as Skitch but it makes up for that with the screencast function.

Get it: Skitch | Jing

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Replacement content editor for WP

Have a love/hate relationship with the built-in HTML (rich content) editor for WordPress? Why not give Foliovision’s Foliopress editor a try?

It has a simpler one row toolbar, ability to strip pasted text formatting, and best of all the ability to use simple <br> without them being stripped out like WP’s built-in editor.

It also features a different image upload and library dialog window but we had some problems with adding an image to this post on Firefox for the Mac. It looks promising with larger thumbnails of images in your media library but we couldn’t get it to work at this point. 🙁

Update: if you’re looking for something that will allow code like iframe or embed tags, try the Extend KSES plugin here.

Get it: Foliovision’s Foliopress editor