I had 3 possible entries lined up for today, including one on:
- A slightly humorous look at my insomnia
- Examining my propensity to pursue the unattainable
- Apple and I, the uneasy alliance
I’m dropping all of that for one reason:
the Mozilla/Firefox DOM Inspector.
If you’re interested in any form of web design, this tool will make your day. It will display the structure of your site, list out the CSS rules that you’ve defined for individual elements, the computed CSS rules (with inheritance), highlights on the page the element you’ve selected on the DOM, supports JS and so much more! And its a Mozilla Firefox plugin. What more do you need? ;-)
Also, I’ve got to put in a plug for Mozilla Firefox. It’s hands down the best browser I’ve found out there. With tabbing, integrated pop-up blocking, fast page displays, standards compliant engine (for you geeks out there), a robust extension system and more…the only question left to ask is:
“Why aren’t you using it?”
Try it out!
Yeah, I’ve been using FireFox on my desktop when I run Windows, because, contrary to popular belief, an ill maintain installation of windows begins to collapse. IE doesn’t work properly on it, and neither does many an application… but FireFox works. And anyways, the desktop is mainly for FreeBSD now anyways.
Paul! You’re back from your weekend :)
How was it btw? Where did you go and what did you guys end up doing?
Firefox has always impressed me (back when they were Phoenix even) and the latest builds prove that those guys remain committed to their work…
And yes, an ill-maintained Windows installation will start to wreak havoc. I suspect the same is true of MacOSX and a Linux installation on which the user hasn’t been careful…
Yeah, I began using Firebird (predecessor to Firefox) about a year ago and now use Firefox. Version 0.9 was just released, but unfortunately two of my favourite plugins don’t seem to be supported yet: mouse gestures and paste-and-go. Regardless, it’s so awesome that if people were to give it a try they’d swear off IE.
Allen, about the domain name service question you asked a little while back, who are you using? I don’t even know who I am (can’t remember). I need to renew mine soon.
Version 0.9 is (subjectively) faster on page loads and initial startup time than before. In addition, creating new windows is speedier and they’ve changed the extension system…
I’m sure within a short time most plugins should be 0.9 compliant (especially if they’re big ones like mouse gestures). Don’t know what paste and go is, but I’ll just google it ;-)
I used Namecheap (http://www.namecheap.com), an Enom (http://www.enom.com) reseller. At $8.88 US per name, they’re cheap and have a host of features, including:
URL redirect/frame (no ads)
Dynamic DNS (important for me)
Email aliases/forwarding
More
Plus, from what I’ve read, people are generally satisfied with their customer support and the quality of the service in general. I’ve bought http://www.allengeorge.com but apparently it takes 24 ~ 48 hours for it to propagate to all the DNS servers (?!).
Apparently I spoke too soon…
http://www.allengeorge.com now redirects properly to this site.
Paste-and-go is pretty simple and allows you to paste a url directly from the clipboard into the address bar using CTRL-SHIFT-V. The page loads automatically (no need to press enter).
I like it.
Yeah, I’ll have to get on top of the renewal process. My domain expires in early September.
Did you purchase a 1-year lease or set it to auto-renew?
Ah – I can see how that can be useful.
I purchased a 1 year lease since I haven’t done this before. However, they have settings like registrar lock, notification if your URL is going to expire within 30 days etc. that can be pretty helpful.
If everything turns out to be fine, I’ll set it to auto renew, since I don’t mind paying $8.88 a year.