Useful Firefox extensions for online news producers

Here’s a list of FireFox tools that can make your job easier… I’ve collected these over the past couple years…

Most-Useful Extensions

Do you want to email a long link to a page? Use this to create (and copy to your clipboard) a shorter version of that link. I use this multiple times every day. When the link to a story page is really long (like those created by IPS), when you paste a link to it in an email, it will often break. When replying to customer emails this is unacceptable … so tinyURL it instead.

Web Developer toolbar: If you don’t know what this is and you do stuff for the web, you oughta. It’s an arsenal of tools that make many parts of web development easier: You can edit CSS “live” on a page, you can automatically fill all the form fields on a page, you can view a page with all the javascript references included inline, you can resize your browser to specified widths…

Good screen-capture program. This puts a button in your top button area that saves an image of the entire browser screen (even the stuff you have to scroll to see) in your My Documents folder. I use this regularly with IPS support, and it’s also useful for certain customer-service requests.

Extensions Definitely Worth Considering

• PDF Download “Allows to choose if you want to view a PDF file inside the browser (as PDF or HTML)”
• Greasemonkey allows you to run custom javascript on your browser on particular sites. What does this mean? It’s basically a way to fix all the stuff you don’t like with the sites you regularly use.
• SiteDelta “Highlights changes made to a website since last visit.”
• Colorzilla “Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.”
• MeasureIt “Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.”
• Advanced Dork “This small, yet powerful extension was designed to give quick access to many of Google’s Advanced Operators.”
• JSView “All browsers include a “View Source” option, but none of them offer the ability to view the source code of external files. Most websites store their javascripts and style sheets in external files and then link to them within a web page’s source code. Previously if you wanted to view the source code of an external javascript/css you would have to manually look through the source code to find the url and then type that into your browser.”
• Text Complete “The text complete extension adds shortcuts and auto complete functionality to text fields within web forms, the thunderbird message composer, and various other fields within the firefox browser.”

Extensions Worth Considering

• Table2Clipboard “If you want to paste data in Microsoft Excel and make it work right use Table2Clipboard.”
• Dilbert “Adds little button to status bar and when you click it, it will show today’s official US Dilbert from
  www.dilbert.com. “
• Html Validator validates your HTML. Why do you want valid HTML? Because it’s one of the first steps to figuring out all the cool stuff you can do with the internet.
• Custom Buttons “Gives a possibility to create custom toolbar buttons.”
• Operator “Operator lets you combine pieces of information on Web sites with applications in ways that are useful.”

Popularity: 33% [?]