Firefox 4.0 Released
Firefox 4.0 was officially released yesterday, you can download it here. You can also see some visualisation on the downloads too, which is rather interesting. So to celebrate it, I thought I’d show off some ideal plugins for the average user and the developer too.
For the User
Most recommended for blocking advertisements, though it might be advisable to unblock websites you’d like to support if you can’t subscribe in one way or another!
Arguably if you have NoScript you wouldn’t need ABP or vice-versa. I like it just as an “extra shield”. Of course, permanently unblock sites you can trust.
Perhaps you want to declutter some of the less used buttons from your bars, or add some which you might not need often. Only just discovering this now, it’s a really nice clean little addon which can be hidden away and acts just like another toolbar. Sweet.
I’ll avoid any further plugins, those are the basics I think everyone should have – beyond customising your own layout (often right click on various bars or the like).
For the Developer
The essential developer tool for Firefox, I’ve combined its Inspect tool with the Vertical Toolbar above, very useful.
An ideal companion for FireBug if you do AJAX development, it can interface with some IDEs too (most notably Aptana in my case). To aide in error reporting.
Ideal for taking screenshots of websites and a pretty simple interface to boot. I switched to this after my previous plugin became incompatible without an update in sight.
That might not seem like many, but I like keeping it lightweight. Don’t forge the Customise option when you right click on bars in various places, it can really help you improve the interface to your liking.
0 Comments »News & Updates
I’m still not happy with the site – as always, I’m my worst critic. I’m working on a redesign currently – and quite looking forward to it. That said one of my intentions was to have a scrolling menu that follows the user as they read – I can likely do this in the CSS or even a jQuery option, but the latter would break given the use of something like NoScript. In addition to that, if the menu becomes bloated users with small screens would be unable to read said menu.
So that rules out putting deep categories or page links there unless I can limit myself, leaving not much else. I guess a further option would be pop-out menus. Then we get the new designer dilemma of the hand-held devices, tablets and smart-phones. Something I am unable to test locally easily or cheaply… I could look into media queries and reactive web design, though its relatively new and something I haven’t toyed with yet.
WP Wonders
I have been spending a fairly large amount of my time getting to know the workings of WordPress, digging deep into the topics of administration page creation. I’m not content with just using a template, even though they can be time savers… it means becoming familiar with someone’s work – and that might deprive me of deeper knowledge.
So yes, at last I’ve cracked my big headache and dug deeper into the mines of backend customisation and creation for WordPress plugins and themes. It seems there are umpteen different ways of doing something in WordPress, slowly though they make methods and options which don’t require complex understanding. Whether the codex has the necessary knowledge is still another matter though.
Expect some articles on this front soon.
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