If you do any kind of web development, and you’re a Firefox user, chances are you know about Firebug.  I began using it a couple years ago when I needed to do some serious Javascript debugging, but it has since become indispensable to me for more basic web design.  It allows you to inspect the HTML and CSS code behind web pages, letting you see exactly why any particular element of a page is displayed how it is.  See an example here of inspecting the Clients link at the bottom of our home page (click for larger):

click for more about on the fly edit/preview, and tools for IE and Safari…

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Andrew Crowe Categories: How To, Technology, Web

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I don’t have much to add to them, but I thought I’d put up some recent finds from around the web that have been really helpful in solving some of the many technical issues I encounter.

• Get WordPress Permalinks Working with Windows, IIS, and ISAPI Rewrite Got WordPress running on a Windows server? Then you should have ISAPI Rewrite and the configuration described in this article to get your blog’s permalinks in a much more search engine (and human) friendly format. We also have ISAPI Rewrite working on our server to get pretty URLs working in Drupal.
• “301” Permanent Redirects Another link in the search engine optimization domain, this guide will show you how to set up these redirects in many different types of server technologies. If you host a site and are making changes to it that make certain URLs obsolete (porting the site to a new CMS, say), then it is really worth your while to set these redirects up for the old pages. Otherwise your search engine ranking could suffer.
• Preparing Your Website for Internet Explorer 8 IE8 came out at the beginning of this year and is gaining some traction. It is way more standards-compliant than previous versions of IE, which is great. However, most sites have IE-specific workarounds (read: hacks) which now pose problems for this new version. This concise guide breaks down everything you need to know about making your sites now work with IE8.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: How To, Technology, Web

Have you ever encountered a situation where you or someone else made an update to a website, but you couldn’t see the change? It’s usually due to how browsers don’t get fresh versions of files from a website you’ve already seen, unless it thinks there are newer versions. Sometimes that process breaks down for various reasons, and a browser doesn’t think there is a new version of a particular file when there actually is, and even clicking the reload button doesn’t help.

In such situations there are special key sequences, different for each browser of course, which force the browser to re-download every file for a page. You can also clear out your browser’s cache for every page in its history. Instructions for both are detailed in this helpful Wikipedia page, broken down by browser for all the major ones, and a couple obscure ones too. Note that the two most common browsers (IE and Firefox) do share one method of cache bypass: Control-F5. Although note that’s Command-F5 in Firefox on a Mac (there’s no IE for Mac).

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Technology, Web