Well, they’ll save you tons of time and a couple of headaches anyway. There are some necessary extensions to Firefox that can make your development go so much smoother, especially in the QA phase or all the time for those of you that subscribe to Test Driven Development. When the Web Developer Extension by Chris Pederick came out in June of 2003, it was a God send. Never before had the web browser been so handy. Previously I had only cursed it, especially IE, which I still do actually – mostly IE6, damn you!

Now there are tons of extensions, most of which are useless, but there are a few good ones worth mentioning. So that you don’t have to weed through the endless pages of add-ons to find the few good ones, here’s the Short List:

Web Developer
Exposes everything about your HTML, JavaScript and CSS. The best feature is by far the ability to disable your cache.

FireBug
The QA person’s best friend. Works a lot like the activity window in Safari, but on steroids. Great to see what your Flash app isn’t loading correctly.

FlashTracer
This one almost makes logging utilities obsolete. Get all your trace output, along with everyone else’s too, and always know what’s happening with your SWFs.

ShowIP
This one is really great when developing for a load balanced environment. Shows you the IP address of the current page in the status bar, nice!

Thanks to my friend Dave Williams for the awesome new logo and site style development. I hope that you all enjoy it as much as I do and that it really helps to communicate my point of view and state of mind on the interactive world that we live and work in.

Be sure to check out Dave’s site: www.mathletic.com

Professional Monkey Keyboard Operator

In true developer fashion, I thought my first blog entry should be a “Hello World!” post. I get a lot of people hitting me up for tips and tricks and figured it was time to just start a blog about interactive development whatnot. After 13 years of experience it’s time to give back to the community. I wouldn’t be where I am in my career if it wasn’t for all the tutorials, articles, blogs, view source and co-workers.

This blog will mostly be about the sharing of knowledge and helping others to make better web sites and interactive applications in more efficient and elegant ways. I will attempt to create tutorials that are immediately useful and will create code samples that people can actually use.

For more on me, see my LinkedIn profile.