Tools

Building javascript minification into MSBuild scripts

How to use a tool called Packer.NET to build javascript minification into a MSBuild script.
Published in ASP.NET, CSS, Javascript, Tools on Saturday, August 29th, 2009

Our web 2.0 wedding

The story of how Joe and I used our favourite web tools to organise our wedding and share the experience with the people who couldn't be there.
Published in Tools, Web development on Saturday, August 1st, 2009

Changing firebug's font size

One problem I’ve had a couple of times when using Firebug to show things during code demos is I haven’t been able to make the font big enough for people at the back to read it. I found the solution at stack overflow: 1. Open firebug in new window 2. Go to the view->text size [...]
Published in Tools on Sunday, November 16th, 2008

Dust-me selector tool for finding unused CSS selectors

My find for today was a Firefox extension called Dust-Me Selectors from the SitePoint guys that scans a web site looking for unused selectors in the CSS. It extracts the style references for the current page and then looks at the page to see where they are used. It can look at the current page [...]
Published in CSS, Tools on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

IETester: test IE5.5 to IE8 on the same computer

My favourite new webdev tool of the moment is IETester. You can use it to test pages in IE5.5, IE6, IE7 and IE8 all on the same machine without messing around with your main installed version of IE. I was pretty amazed when I saw it because I’d always believed that it was a bit [...]
Published in Browsers, Tools on Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Debugging pages in Safari

I’m getting quite interested in Safari because it seems to be where a lot of the early implementations of interesting new standards is happening. It makes me happy to get a little glimpse at what the future of web development might look like. :) The problem is Firefox has really spoilt me with all it’s [...]
Published in Tools on Saturday, July 5th, 2008

View Rendered Source in IE

I’m doing a lot of work with javascript that modifies the DOM so I really like tools like the Firefox rendered source chart plugin so I can see what’s actually going on in my page. Rendered source chart in particular is a very slick plugin. It not only takes everything in the DOM and shows [...]
Published in Tools, Web development on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007

Javascript lint – saviour of mortal developers

Something I really, really love at the moment is a little application called javascript lint. It’s a javascript syntax checker that’s built on top of the Mozilla javascript engine. You can run it over a javascript include file (I don’t know if it’ll work on inline javascript) and it’ll syntax check it for you without [...]
Published in Javascript, Tools, Web development on Monday, February 5th, 2007

New link for IE drip memory leak detector

I found a link to a new page for the really useful drip tool which looks for IE memory leaks in javascript code. There’s also been a new revision of the program by the guy who’s hosting it.
Published in Javascript, Tools, Web development on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006

Bookmark: web developer toolbars

Here’s a quick link for myself for the web developer toolbars you can install for Firefox and IE6. I love them because the web developer toolbars make doing clientside work so much easier. They give you tools to find out information about the page that you’re working on without having to do a million alert [...]
Published in Browsers, Tools, Web development on Monday, June 5th, 2006

IE developer toolbar

The kids over at Microsoft have released an IE developer toolbar. It’s got most the nice things that the Firefox toolbar has like box outlining and options to disable scripts and cookies. One of the nice features it has that isn’t included in the firefox version is a little ruler tool that lets you measure [...]
Published in Tools on Thursday, November 17th, 2005

JSLint: neat javascript script verifier tool

I found a useful little utility called Lint that checks for things in your javascript code that’s likely to introduce errors. I really like that it checks for undeclared variables because I always, always, always want to declare my variables before I use them. Considering that forgetting to declare the variable sets it global for [...]
Published in Javascript, Tools on Monday, August 15th, 2005