Cool Free Stuff for Webmasters

I can’t say for sure because I do all my coding by hand in a plain text editor, but I’m willing to bet that not even the fancy commercial web design software packages offer all these fun freebies for webmasters.

View Source Chart

Jennifer Madden’s awesome View Source Chart extension for Firefox redraws any webpage’s source code as a beautiful, intuitive, color-coded chart. After you install View Source Chart, it appears as the last item under Firefox’s View menu. Version 2.7 for Firefox 3 costs $10 U.S. I’m using version 2.5.0503, which is free. An older version that only works in Firefox 2 is still available. You can download View Source Chart here, and forget about poking around in the DOM trying to find those elusive missing <DIV> or duplicate <SPAN> tags. View Source Chart is written in javascript.

Color Blender

Another cool javascript tool I use all the time is Eric Meyer’s Color Blender, which makes it super-easy to blend two colors and get the hex codes for up to 10 midpoints between them. You can save the Color Blender html page to your hard drive and use it offline.

Pixel Ruler

PixelRuler 3 from MioPlanet.com can be placed onscreen vertically or horizontally. It knows what screen resolution you’re using, and it measures any element in pixels. You can move it around, rotate it,
and change the color to  shiny blue, shiny green, or shiny orange!

Cheat sheets

Added Bytes Cheat Sheets offers cheat sheets for mod_rewrite, css, regular expressions, and even World of Warcraft.

Rarely used characters

And finally, I  ♥ this character entity chart at evolt.org. It’s a one-stop shop for all the characters you don’t normally use, but might conceivably need to put on a webpage at some point … stuff like ≠ … “not equal to,” which is written “& # 8 8 0 0 ;” — without the spaces — in html. There’s a huge amount of other good reading material on evolt.org, especially in the Backend and Code sections.

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Author:Elizabeth Dearborn

Elizabeth is a former medical transcriptionist who now publishes websites and books, and writes flash fiction and computer code. She runs http://www.MeDiCaLeSe.org, http://www.wnylandlord.com, and http://www.elizabethd.net. She lives in Buffalo, New York, about five miles from the Canadian border. Rig: Dell Dimension 4400, Windows XP, 2.2 Gb Intel processor, 1 Gb RAM, Altec Lansing sound system with subwoofer Currently playing: Caesar III
  • Scott

    Nice post!