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6 Brilliant Wordpress Plugins

Blowsie — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 15:54:16 +0000

The endless amounts of brilliant wordpress plugins never seizes to amaze me. Web developers world wide share their often sincerly well produced plugins to Wordpress’s users fingertips for a better web experience.
Over the last few years I’ve almost been able to find a Wordpress plugin for almost everything, here are some of the Plugins I often come back to which are what I consider to be some of the very best out there.

Google XML Sitemaps

All in One SEO Pack

NextGEN Gallery

Contact Form 7

Flutter

Ultimate Google Analytics

10 Design Web Applications I adore

Blowsie — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 13:29:24 +0000

From mocking up designs online in Pixlr to tracking your website hits and statistcs in Google Analytics there’s always a web application that can be used to make your design process more efficient. Here are some of the Web Applications I use most to provide a better experience for me as a designer, the client and the end user.

Favicon.CC

“favicon.cc is a tool to create or download favicon.ico icons, that get displayed in the address bar of every browser.”
Pxtoem.com

“PXtoEM.com is px to em conversion made simple. Choose your body font size in pixels (px)and out comes a complete pixel (px) to em conversion table, making elastic web design with CSS a snap”
Pixlr Editor

“Pixlr is a free online photo editor. Fix, adjust and filter your images. Manage your images in your browser, no registration jump right in!”
Type Tester

“The Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. Its primary role is to make web designer’s life easier. As the new fonts are bundled into operating systems, the list of the common fonts will be updated.”
Vector Magic

“Easily Convert Bitmap Images To Clean Vector Art
Convert bitmap images like JPEGs, GIFs and PNGs to the crisp, clean, scalable vector art of EPS, SVG, and PDF with the world’s best auto-tracing software.“
Adobe Browser Lab

“An easier, faster solution for cross-browser testing
Preview and test your webpages on leading browsers and operating systems – on demand. Adobe BrowserLab makes it easier and faster than ever before to see how your designs appear to your customers and audience. Get your results in real time, from virtually any computer connected to the web.”
Adobe Kuler

“Explore, create and share color themes.
Discover Adobe® Kuler™ — the web-hosted application for generating color themes that can inspire any project. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.”
Google Analytics

“Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.“
CSS Optimizer

“Online CSS Optimizer/Optimiser is a web tool for reducing the file size of cascading style sheets. In order to save more space optimized files would be messy even so you may output it as a file. Non-valid or hacked (for certain browsers) CSS files may result in error.“
Mesh

“With Live Mesh, you can synchronize files with all of your devices, so you always have the latest versions handy. Access your files from any device or from the web, easily share them with others, and get notified whenever someone changes a file.”

10 Firefox Developer Add-ons I adore!

Blowsie — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:15:31 +0000

With over 1 Billion downloads, Mozilla’s Firefox has proven to be once of the most effective and best performing web browser available.
There are a huge selection of plug-ins available to suit every ones needs from plug-ins which make the end users experience a customized and enhanced experience.
The plugins I am writing about today are simply my favorite plugins I use as a developer.

Firebug

“Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page..”
Web Developer

“The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.”
Pixel Perfect

“Pixel Perfect is a Firefox/Firebug extension that allows web developers and designers to easily overlay a web composition over top of the developed HTML.”
YSlow

“YSlow analyzes web pages and why they’re slow based on Yahoo!’s rules for high performance web sites.”
Dust Me Selectors

“Finds unused CSS selectors.”
ColorZilla

“Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies..”
Pixlr

“Open images and screen grabs from the web direct in the pixlr image editor or pixlr photo express.

Edit your photos directly in your browser “
CodeBurner

“CodeBurner is a Firefox add-on that integrates with Firebug, to extend it with reference material for HTML and CSS.”
IE Tab

“IE Tab – an extension from Taiwan, features: Embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox…”
DT Whois

“Domaintools.com whois button..”

Pixel Perfect is a Firefox/Firebug extension that allows web developers and designers to easily overlay a web composition over top of the developed HTML.