Web Dev, Linux, WordPress & More
If you’re a Firefox user and design websites, definitely check out the FireBug extension for Firefox. According to the Mozilla site:
FireBug [has] all of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including a debugger, an error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors.
Pictures and images can make or break a site. Using imagery well can guide an audience, reinforce website copy, and solidify your brand.
On the web, pictures are “worth a thousand words” because they can illustrate a concept in milliseconds, provide visual interest, and break up the monotony of text.
Use the Display Element Information feature in the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar to figure out what’s Cascading in your CSS. It could save you hours of frustration, preserve handfuls of hair, and give you quick visual cues about the extended ‘family’ of an element in your CSS.
As I’ve mentioned before, if you’re not using Firefox, you darn well should be. Just do it already, okay? Here are a few reasons why.
Then download the Web Developer Toolbar; an incredibly useful, free Firefox Extension for web designers. Even after using it for well over a year, I’m still finding helpful features.
I promise that I won’t make every post about icon sources, but while I’m thinking of it, here’s one more icon project that I’d certainly endorse: Dan Cederholm’s SimpleBits Icons.
Dan’s written a few terrific books on web standards design entitled Web Standards Solutions and Bulletproof Web Design.
I highly recommend them both. They camp out next to me in my quick reference stack and I refer to them regularly. If you’re into CSS and web standards, they’re downright fun to read. But I digress . . .
Mr. Cederholm also created some royalty-free stock icons that you can purchase directly from his site, and although he doesn’t have the same variety of iconography as some other sources, I like his simple, direct style.
Another place to pick up stock icons for your web projects is at IconBuffet.com.
Created by Firewheel Design, IconBuffet has an interesting business model: they give away icons.
If you signup for their Free Delivery program, they’ll send a small set of icons to you every month for free. You can then swap icons with other members in their active forum community.