Essential Web Developer Toolbar

I have recently started using the Web Developer extension for firefox by Chris Pederick and I wonder how I ever managed without it.

It adds a toolbar to Firefox with a huge array of tools for analysing, viewing, editing and validating whatever webpage you are viewing. I had other tools and bookmarklets that accomplished the same tasks, but having them all (and more) in one place is a godsend.

One of the most useful tools is the CSS editing window which allows you to edit stylesheets and see the results onscreen immediately – very useful for editing dynamic pages.

You can also disable stylesheets and javascript, view info about images and links, outline various elements, use a ruler to measure sizes on screen, validate the document… you name it, it does it.

So, it’s great for development, but also for seeing how other sites achieve their design and layout.

I highly recomend it! http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/

Styling Form Submit Buttons

The default form submit button looks ugly on almost any website. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to style it to fit in with your design?

Even better, how about adding a hover effect to make it clear that clicking on it does something?

After a bit of searching, I’ve found the solution at www.digital-web.com – using the <button> tag. With the addition of some javascript to cope with IE’s lack of support for the :hover pseudo class, you can even have hover effects.

Check out the excellent virtual Christmas card example at digital-web.com to see how far you can go with this.

Spam Update

The anti form spam measure I outlined in my previous post seems to have worked.

After a day or so I was down from 10+ spam emails a day to only one or two.

Strangely, they were of a similar format (similar gobbldy gook in the submitted fields) to the ones that used to clog up my inbox. Which suggests they were automated?

Anyway, happily they now seem to have tailed off completely.

So all is well until a more advanced spam bot comes along and can beat this anti spam method.

However, there is scope to change the method I described because there is always more than one way to achieve the same result using CSS, for example different methods to hide the fake fields.