Nothing exciting really…

Ok, next Firefox extension for web developers, but more for web masters, is SeoQuake. SeoQuake is an excellent tool for web masters to track how they are doing with SEO. SeoQuake adds an extra information to SERPs in Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc… There is a ton of information options, too many to talk about here, but the main ones of interest are:

• Google PageRank
• No. of page indexed in Google
• No. of in-links in Google
• Google cached date for the page
• No. of page indexed in Yahoo!
• No. of in-links in Yahoo!
• No. of page indexed in MSN
• No. of in-links in MSN
• No. of entries in DMOZ
• Alexa rank
• No. of entries in del.icio.us

SeoQuake also adds a toolbar to every page you view and you can view the same stats as you can on SERPs.

Continuing with my look at web developer tools for Firefox, today I want to tell you about Tamper Data. Tamper Data allows you to view and tamper with the HTTP request and response headers. Tamper Data is quiet a simple plugin. Once installed, simply go to the ‘Tools’ menu in Firefox and click the ‘Tamper Data’ menu item. Tamper Data will then open in a new window. In this state, Tamper Data will simply display any HTTP request as and when it happens. The table at the top gives you a list of requests. If you click one of the requests it will then display the full request and response header in the two frames below the table. If you click the ‘Start Tamper’ option, when the next HTTP request is activated a dialog box will give you the options ‘Tamper’, ‘Submit’ and ‘Abort Request’. If you click ‘tamper’, another window lets you change the request parameters and then continue with the request. Clicking the ‘Submit’ option will submit the request as it is, and the ‘Abort Request’ option will stop the request from being sent.

Tamper Data is useful to test the security of web applications by modifying POST parameters. Tamper Data also gives you other good diagnostic information, like the status code and the time taken for HTTP requests.

So, carrying on from yesterdays discussion of Firebug, today I’m looking at another Firefox extension that help web developers. The extension is aptly called ‘Web Developer Extension’. The ‘Web Developer Extension’ adds a toolbar to Firefox that adds a hugh range of useful tools to Firefox. The tools are split into 11 sections, these sections are:

• Disable: Allows you to disable various things on the fly, like Javascript, Minimum font size, page colours, etc..
• Cookies: Allow you to manipulate cookies doing things like deleting session cookie, domain cookies, view cookie infomation, etc…
• CSS: The CSS menu lets you disable style, either all or by type, view a stylesheet, view style information, etc..
• Forms: The forms menu lets you display details of a form, show passwords, etc…
• Images: The images menu lets you disable images, show information about images, find broken images, etc…
• Information: The information menu lets you display a huge amount of information about the page. A few of the things you can display are anchors, div order, table information, javascript, response headers, etc…
• Miscellaneous: The miscellaneous menu has several useful tools like the page magnifier, ruler, showing comments and hidden elements, plus more.
• Outline: The outline menu allows you to add an outline to elements on the page so you can identify them easily.
• Resize: The resize menu will resize the browser window to different size for different screen resolutions.
• Tools: The tools menu has a load of tools to allow you to validate the HTML, CSS, etc.. of the page as well as access the DOM Inspector, Java console, etc…
• View Source: The view source menu to view the page source, view the source from different frames, view generated source and view the source in different applications.

The “web developers extension” is available from: http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/

Firebug is an excellent Firefox plugin for web developers. Firebug allows you to view, edit and debug HTML, CSS and Javascript live in the browser for any web page. Firebug intergrates directly into the browser window appearing at the bottom of the screen, but can also be displayed in a separate window.

One of the best features of Firebug is the ‘Inspector’. The ‘Inspector’ allows you find HTML elements within your code and then inspect. It allow you to see all the CSS assoicated with the element, both directly applied and inherited. You can then edit these properties live and see the results of these edits live as well.

Firebug’s visualisation of CSS metrics will measure and illustrate all the offsets, margins, borders, padding, and sizes and show them on screen.

Firebug also lets you debug Javascript in great detail. It gives you detailed information about error, allows you to set watches and breakpoints, log calls to functions, etc… Firebug also let you execute Javascript on the fly from a command line.

Firebug also lets you explore the DOM, find DOM object and quickly edit them on the fly.

Another feature of Firebug is its network monitor. The network monitoring tool let you see the load of time of the components within your page, allowing you to optimize your page quickly and easily.

Firebug is an excellent tool for all web develops, making it quick and easily to debug problems with both layout and scripting.

Get Firebug today at http://www.getfirebug.com/

In a survey carried out by Jupiter Research, many music company executive admitted that digital rights management (DRM) was is “not fit for purpose”. The majority also thought that removing DRM from music downloads so that music could be played on any music playing device would boost sales.

At last it seems that music industry seem to be understanding that DRM is not a good idea and along with Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) who condemned DRM last week and said that it was only part of the Apple iPod and iTunes because of the music industry DRM could be on the way out.

In the two separate but related stories, it appears that a group of crackers have managed to break the encryption algorithm for Blu-ray (Sony’s high resolution DVD style format) and HD DVD allowing them to rip the disc’s and make copies and Sony executive David Bishop has said that the format war can be official declared over as they have won already.

The news of the cracking of the “Advanced Access Content System” (AACS) came in a posting on the Doom9 forum which had previously had user post cracks for individual title on Blu-Ray or HD DVD but the discovery of a “processing key” now allows the cracking of all titles encrypted using AACS.

Mr Bishop, citing recent sales figures that show Blu-Ray out sold HD DVD by approximately 2:1 simply declared the format war “official over”. The sales figures Mr Bishop was reference to only cover a 2 week period, hardly enough time to decide the format war and considering that only a handful of players and DVD of either format are available that is a ridiculous claim by any standard.