If you use Google Reader as your RSS reader of choice, you may have wished that you could have more control over how it displays things. Luckily, with the use of Firefox and a couple Greasemonkey scripts, you have a few options for tweaking its behavior.
Have you ever watched a Flash video on a website and wanted to save it to your computer? Chances are, if you were persistent, you found the SWF Flash file in the source and tried downloading that, but typically that isn’t the file you’re looking for. Usually websites use a SWF player that loads external Flash files that have an FLV file extension. To easily find these files and save them to your computer, you can use Firefox’s disk cache interface.
In the past, I’ve been asked what Firefox add-ons I use to make web development and web design easier. So I thought I’d pull this list together and offer my suggestions on what works for me. I am constantly trying out new add-ons, but these are the ones that I have kept ever since installing them. Some of these add-ons are absolute must-haves, while others just provide some nice features that make browsing more convenient. If you think I’ve missed any that you find essential to web design and development, please leave a comment.
As I was implementing my new site, I couldn’t quite get my archives page to display the way I intended. What I wanted was a list of months grouped by year. Wordpress has a function built in called wp_get_archives that will display your archives by month, but this can generate a very long list, and it does not group by year like I wanted. I also found this example, which is closer to what I wanted, but still not quite right. I also looked at a few plugins, but I ultimately decided to just write the code myself.
If you maintain a site based on Wordpress, you may have noticed that the head section of your pages can get out of control rather quickly, especially if you have a lot of plugins installed. It is fairly easy to eliminate some of this unnecessary bloat.