These are top 5 must have addons for Firefox that a web-developer needs.

1. Firebug: According to official website, Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

   You can easily inspect html elements, tweak CSS, monitor network, debug Javascript, explore DOM, and execute javascript on the fly. Firebug is extremely easy to use and can help a lot while designing or developing web-applications.

   

2. Web Developer Toolbar: Web developer extension is a compilation of all the useful and necessary actions that we may need to perform to check the efficiency and integrity of the web-application under development. For example, disabling the CSS, disabling Javascript, mouseover DOM inspector, operation on session and cookies etc.

   

3. Measureit: Often while developing web-application, we need to measure the dimensions of DIV or any other HTML elements to either design the web-page according to the need or while removing glitches when it occurs. To do so, we need Measureit firefox addon. I can measure the dimensions of the object with respect to the resolution of the monitor used.

   

4. Colorzilla: It’s a Firefox extension which helps developer in getting color from any point in the browser, quickly adjusting this color and pasting it into another program, such as Photoshop or GIMP, used for Web-Designing. It also has the feature of zooming a web-page and measuring the distance between two points on the page.
5. IE-tab Plus: IE-tab is a great help when we are designing a web-application. Most of the users still use Internet Explorer 6, which comes as a default in Windows XP. So, when a developer is developing an application he has to take care of every intrinsic aspect of web-application and since the IE-6 engine has its own tantrums this tool comes in handy. One can view how a web-page looks like in IE. It also has cookies being exchanged between Mozilla and IE so you need not login again.
   

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4. Download Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Beta 3

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Online Image Splitter

Online Image Splitter is a web utility that lets you to slice images into smaller segments without any loss in the image quality. In addition to this you can quickly create navigational bars with mouse-over effects. This application also provides HTML tags for pasting the sliced images together. It has lots of features like slicing out any format of images (JPG, GIF, PNG), HTML tagging for pasting slices back together, advanced options to optimize the images, automatic color selection for “no image” slices.

Image Cut

With this tool you can make your images load faster and improve the site ranking on search engines. With this tool you can split the image into two parts. Image Cut is SEO-aware and help you in improving site ranking by inserting ALT description image tags on every image which means you can add keyword-optimized titles and description for all your images.

Batch It! Ultra

It is a windows based GUI batch Image Processor made for new users. It allows you to batch resize, rename, add captions, converts, create thumbnail gallery and slice images. It makes easy for every web designers or digital photographers to place their images up on the web or on CD_ROM in a neat thumbnail gallery.

HTML/XML Image Grid AS2

It allows you to display image collections in a HTML/CSS formatted grid. You can easily edit the external XML or HTML layout file using your favorite XML/HTML editor and the Flash applications will dynamically render it and scroll it for you. It has lots of features like image collections in HTML format, advanced text rendering options, custom library fonts, external style-sheet files, custom colors, transparency for borders and backgrounds, padding, spacing, highly customizable components, browser window re-size support, easy to adjust fading effects and each graphic element.

WebImager

With WebImager, you can take the screenshot of any web page. WebImager ActiveX can capture the entire web page as JPG, BMP, PNG and GIF image on the fly. WebImager ActiveX Component uses Internet Explorer’s functionality to take (capture) a snapshot of a given URL. It utilizes the web browser control on Windows to download the webpage and then capture it as an image. It can easily be integrated into a variety of applications written in languages that support ActiveX Components such as Visual C++, Visual Basic, Delphi, C++ Builder, .Net languages, Java, Scripts like Perl, Php, Python.

Web Image Protector

With this tool you can protect your images on your web page from unauthorized cloning or internet theft. It divides your web image into pieces and generates HTML code that displays the whole image, thereby it prevents users from saving the image by right clicking and selecting “Save Image As..”. It also disables screen capture and page printing do that user have no way to copy your images.

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Vanityvid is an Israeli startup that turns the users profile pic into a video on Facebook, Twitter and more. A Vanityvid lets your profile pic come alive. Wherever your profile pic shows, be it on social networks or online communities or even blog comments, people will also be able to see you move and hear you talking, and get a better feeling of who you are and what you’re like.

The videos can be created through a webcam, emailing through your cellphone or by uploading a video file directly. The Vanityvids can be at max 17 seconds long and up to 20 different Vanityvids are allowed for a single account.

Let me make it clear. Currently VanityVid does NOT replace your Facebook (or Twitter) profile picture. That is because Vanityvids would be displayed on sites which partner with them and they are currently waiting for an official partnership with Facebook and Twitter. So, currently, the best way to view Vanityvids on profiles like Facebook and Twitter is through their add-ons for Firefox and Chrome. Once you have the add-on installed, if a profile you are browsing has a Vanityvid created photo, you will see the video when you click on it.

The video demo from one of the VanityVid founders explains the service in detail.

Innovative, isn’t it? I find this simple service a real fun tool to have. It would be great if they can allow users to embed videos from sites like Youtube and may be Facebook itself. If you are a blogger using WordPress, VanityVid has a WordPress plugin with some interesting features.

VanityVid WordPress Plugin

The basic idea is to let bloggers post an “About me” video and let their readers have their own VanityVids in the comment section. Your Vanityvid will appear wherever your WordPress avatar appears on your blog. It will also appear on other blogs that installed this plugin.

Having videos instead of just plain profile pics increases the interaction and engagement of your blog, makes it more social, and it’s also just plain cool. This may not be relevant for all blogs and bloggers, but will definitely sounds interesting for community based blogs and buddypress forums.

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© Raju PP for Technically Personal!, 2010. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us, so we can take legal action immediately. If you are on Twitter you can follow me @rajupp! | Permalink |

Pingdom tools – one of the most popular and accurate tools to test page loading time of websites has added DNS Health checkup tool to its arsenal.

DNS or the Domain Name System is a vital part of the world wide web. It is very important for the websites to have proper DNS settings. Website downtime is just one of the many issues you can face with improper DNS settings. On top of that, bad DNS settings can be hard to track down and can cause a lot of head ache for webmasters and site owners.

Check out DNS Health Test Tool

All you need to do is just input your website name in the text box provided and click on “Test now”. There are 6 different tests which get carried out – Delegation, Nameserver, Consistency, SOA, Connectivity and DNSSEC.

If your DNS settings are absolutely proper, you will see Green buttons for all the 6 individual tests carried out. For warnings, you will see amber colored buttons. Red buttons indicate a major issue. Clicking on Advanced View tab will give a better idea on what’s wrong. Best thing for you to do would be to contact your hosting/DNS provider in case of a problem.

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© Raju PP for Technically Personal!, 2010. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us, so we can take legal action immediately. If you are on Twitter you can follow me @rajupp! | Permalink |

1. Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer is one of the most popular and awesome desktop blogging applications that can really speed up your blogging and makes easier to compose compelling blog posts. The user interface is simple and friendly and comes with lots of features like multiple blog accounts, compatibility with multiple blog platforms, rich text formatting, draft saving, post categorization, picture and tag insertion, spelling checking, pinging search engines automatically and synchronizing draft changes on the editor with the blog.

2. Zoundry Raven

Zoundary Raven is a WYSIWYG-blog editor with XHTML editing that makes posting on your blogs much easier and faster. It is easy to use word processor with features like simple tools to add links, tags, photos, music and video files and more. In addition to it you can browse all of your previous posts across all of your blogs by tags, links or images.

3. BlogDesk

BlogDesk is a multi-language blog editor which allows you to speed up the blogging process and makes it easy to write. BlogDesk comes with unique and intuitive features like you can upload and edit pictures using the Image Wizard directly without tampering the images using an image processing editor, it also lets you to easily insert and edit links. In addition to this, there is a support for technorati tags, a pinger and a spell checker too.

4. w.bloggar

w.bloggar is for advanced users because it is a professional blog editor which is being used by technology geeks. It is snappy and has all the features of windows live writer in addition to import text files, posting to many blogs, pinging posts to Weblogs, blo.gs, Technorati and Ping-o-matic, number of formatting options, supports multiple blog accounts and much more. With this you can also set up your FTP account to upload files and pictures. One of the best part of this desktop blogging client is the speed with which it publishes posts and pinging service. This editor comes in HTML mode and you can easily see all the code in your posts easily.

These are some of the popular desktop blogging tools which really can help you to increase your productivity and saves a lot of valuable time for you.

Finally in the comments section do let us know which tool you like the most and why? If I missed out any of the tool then let us know in the comments section.

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© Raju PP for Technically Personal!, 2010. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us, so we can take legal action immediately. If you are on Twitter you can follow me @rajupp! | Permalink |

Guest post by Rishi

RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video in a standardized format. Now with popularity of RSS feeds at its peak, many of us end up subscribing to lot of feeds. Unless you planned and managed feed subscriptions, the feeds you subscribed might become an overload.

To fight with this feed overload, Here are some tips you can use!

Use A Better Feed Reader

This is a must-do thing for anyone. If you track good number of feeds, you should use a good feed reader / feed aggregator. It will provide you with more flexibility and open service. If you can invest some bucks, then my for sure recommendation is FeedDemon which is a choice of many big bloggers. If you want to go for free service, check Bloglines for online reading and RSS-Owl for desktop.

Use Categories, Folders & Tags

If your feed reader provides categories, folder or tags function, be sure you use them. What it will do is lessen down the burden of browsing for a specific topic. Like you tag a blog with ‘Web 2.0′ or put it in a folder ‘Web 2.0′, whenever you are looking for Web 2.0 news, you will not need to browse through your long list, just search the tag or check the folder.

Subscribe To Categories, Not Blog

If you want to track only a specific category from a blog, then subscribe to that category’s feed, not the whole blog. Like if you want to track TechPP’s TimePass Category, you can just subscribe to its RSS Feed at techpp.com/category/timepass/feed/. This is really useful to increase your flexibility in tracking feeds. For WordPress blogs, the category feed is available on the category link with a feed follow up, for example: yourdomain.com/category/category-name/feed/.

Unsubscribe

You should regularly unsubscribe to blog feeds which are not updated regularly or are not providing stuff you need. Especially if you have subscribed to many feeds, do a quick clean-up every week as to what is useful & relevant and what is not.

Recommended Feed Readers

• FeedDemon
• RssOwl
• Bloglines
• Google Reader

This guest post was written by Rishi from Word Tweeting. Checkout his blog for more blogging and productivity tips. You can also Follow him on Twitter at @Rishi

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Guest Post by Eric Woolf

When I first got into the blogger world, like most other people, I didn’t know where to start. And when I did write a great post that I spent a lot of time in, I was lucky to get one person to read it. Sometimes you feel like you’re writing for one. If this sounds familiar, then read these reasons and tips to more interaction with people across the web.

1. First, give it time and effort. It’s not easy starting out, especially as the internet gets bigger and bigger each day with more competition. Just as starting a new business takes a lot of work to brand and get customers, so does a blog or website, even if it isn’t used to make money. You need to focus on consistently writing great content and people will catch on after awhile.

2. Include pictures into your post to make the reading more appealing, even if the pictures are stock photos. Stock photos are better than nothing, but original are the best when they are targeted to what you’re talking about.

3. After writing a post, be sure to let you friend know about it on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or Myspace. Tell them to please retweet it or hit the share button. Ask them to do this each time you make a post. So if you have just 5 friends and 20 posts, you could have a 100 Facebook shares and 100 tweets about it across the web. Imagine how this can grow after your continuously write great posts.

4. Submit your great posts to multiple social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, or Reddit. A lot of times, other bloggers appreciate great content and will link to it from their blog. This can help you gain recognition and readers to your site.

5. Through time, this will grow like crazy if you implement these strategies. Its continuous work, but it will pay off down the line if you monetize it with advertising or by selling products.

6. If your blogging with the WordPress blog platform, I recommend you install the free plugin called “Subscribe to Comments“. This is an amazing plugin that allows people to get email notifications after they submit a comment. So without any effort, the person who left a comment will get an email if anyone else leaves a reply after them. This can remind them to come back to your blog and helps build brand recognition for your site. And the more people that see your blog, the more likely it is for them to let their friends know about it which leaves me to my next point.

7. Like I said before, the more people you have coming to your site, the more likely it is for them to let other people know. That’s why it’s important to display some social media buttons or icons on your blog. This allows them to easily submit your post to social sites that they are registered to. One of them is AddThis.

I hope you liked my post and it will help as long as you have some patience, along with some hard work. It will become fun later on as you interact with more people.

This was a guest post written by Eric Woolf, a member of a small professional web design and Cincinnati search engine optimization company called Pixels & Dots. You can also share your tips by writing a guest article on TechPP.

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In my previous post, I discussed 4 SEO analysis tools for newbies, and I promised one on optimization of search engine result. Since WordPress is most used platform for web-blogs, here are 4 plugins for search engine optimization for WordPress.

• HeadSpace2 SEO -
  It is an extensive meta-data manager and is slightly difficult to configure as compared to other plugins, but it’s the most powerful too. It gives options to configure meta-data separately for posts, pages, categories, home page, author page, search page and 404 pages.  It has special panels to let user add codes from Google Analytics, Google Webmaster etc.
  One of the other important aspects of this plugin is that, it provides import function from other existing SEO plugins like ‘All in one SEO’, ‘Ultimate Tag Warrior’ etc.
• All in One SEO Pack -
  This is one of the most used plugin of all those discussed here. All in one SEO has lots of features and is extremely easy to use. It supports built in API and hence can be used with many themes/plugins. Unlike HeadSpace, this plugin automatically optimizes title for title for search engine.
  It has every functionality already set and as a beginner all you have to do is to install this plugin, then enter a few details and you are up and running.
• Greg’s High Performance SEO -
  This is probably the most extensive plugin available till date, for SEO. It offers direct control over hundred plus page characteristics. In spite of its extents it can still be used by newbies as most of the fields are already set for defaults.  One can modify many options available such as modifying Tag Archives, Author Archives etc.
• Platinum SEO Pack -
  Platinum SEO pack is a much simpler alternative of all the other SEO options available. Though the number of fields is limited, it still is very effective tool for getting better search engine result. It automatically generates all SEO relevant META tags. It is compatible with most of the other existing SEO plugins, so can be used incognito with them.

[img] courtesy

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Now the question arises how to enhance the search engine presence of a particular website. The methodology that is deployed to improve search engine score is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

We have already discussed why SEO is important to a web-blog and we will see how to enhance SEO of a web-blog (based on WordPress) in our next article, but right now my aim is to tell you about some really interesting tools to analyze SEO of a website.

Not all startups are as rich as the big-names, and can hire specialists. SEO is not an easy task; it takes a lot of effort and in-depth analysis. A hobbyist or a part-time blogger won’t spend a lot of resource in SEO; rather they would try to do the best they can by themselves. Here are some SEO analysis tools they can use to analyze their SEO performance.

Top SEO Analysis Tools

1. SEO Workers Search Engine Optimization Analysis Tool

SEO Workers Analysis Tool is one of the easiest and most used SEO analysis tool. It can analyze SEO presence of a particular page and parses the text of a page to match the relevance of keywords in text. It gives a percentage analysis of Title Tags, Meta Description Tags and Meta Keyword Tag. Also it gives a percentage relevance of the keyword. It also talks about anchor-tags and alt property of Images.

2. The Reaction Engine

Unlike the previous SEO tool the Reaction Engine takes both the URL as well as a Meta keyword to analyze its relevance in the text of website. It gives a result in terms of Grades varying from A-F. The content link and Meta of a page is analyzed to give a score which calculates the grades. Results from Search engines, page-load time and host are also taken in consideration.

3. Pineberry – Analysis tool

Pineberry is one of the simplistic as well as the most explanatory tool I came across so far. It explains every single detail specific to the page and the relevance of keyword.  It also imparts scores to each of the attributes that determine SEO of a page, and overall score is displayed in the end. It really helps if you are tweaking your website to perform better in SEO.

4. Pearanalytics

Pearanalytics gives a score of a website based on the statistics provided by various sources such as Google, Alexa etc. The result has an overall score and a percentile based on which one can determine the presence of the website on search engine result.

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Adding custom fonts to your blog is very difficult because for this you need a programming skill, as far as I know most of them hate it because you have to edit your CSS file (if you had design or coded your own theme then it is easy for you and if you are using free theme then you find it bit tricky and time consuming). And one more thing in addition to it, if your blog design uses a special type of font that doesn’t exist in reader’s machine, then you are creating a problem for yourself. To avoid all these problems you can easily add custom font to your wordpress blog.

Now it’s become quite easy to add custom fonts to your webpages because from the myriad of wordpress plugin gallery you can pick any plugin to customize the fonts of your blog. Well to do this, there is plugin “AnyFont WordPress Plugin”, this plugin will let you to upload your own font files and you can easily apply them to any element of your site without editing any file or knowledge of html/css.

Some of the features of this plugin are as follows:

• Compatible with WPMU/Wordpress 3.0
• Font Manager to easily upload new fonts to WordPress
• Style Management which allows an unlimited number of different styles to be created
• Font shadow options within the style manager(Requires PHP5 & ImageMagick).
• Image Cache for generated images plus browser caching is enabled for images to reduce page load times
• Cache overview and Management tool
• Easy text replacement options for post titles, page titles, blog name, blog description and widget titles.
• Image replacements are SEO compatible
• Help icon for every single option to guide you when setting things up for the first time
• Character Map to quickly check which characters are available for each font
• Font shadows available by using Style Manager

Screenshots of this plugin are being listed below:

Download This awesome plugin from here: AnyFont WordPress Plugin

Well if you like this then you might also like these wonderful plugins on WordPress
Top 10 WordPress Image Plugins
Top 10 WordPress Plugins To Secure Your Login Panel
WordPress Plugin on Customizing your Dashboard
Top 5 WordPress Plugins on Social Bookmarking

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