My Essential Developer’s Toolbox – Part III
This is Part III of the My Essential Developer’s Toolbox post reviewing some of the tools I use on a regular basis.
Part I of the My Essential Developer’s Toolbox listed IDEs for ASP.NET, PHP, other open source technologies as well as Database Management applications for Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL. Click here to read the post.
Part II of the My Essential Developer’s Toolbox listed versioning apps, remote server communication apps, networking tools and text editors . Click here to read the post.
Browsers
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=E59C3964-672D-4511-BB3E-2D5E1DB91038&displaylang=en
This is very similar to the Web Developer plugin for Firefox with mostly the same tools and features.
Fiddler
http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/
This tool allows you to log the raw traffic that is sent to your Internet Explorer browser. Everything from HTTP headers to the post data is available with a large set of tools to help you find exactly what you are looking for.
MultipleIE
http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE
If you have Internet Explorer 7 installed you cannot use IE 6. With this tool you can overcome this drawback and run versions of IE as early as IE 3. Interesting to view your modern sites on the old browers.
NOTE: From forums I have read that MultipleIE still uses the IE 7 JavaScript rendering engine but I can’t confirm if that’s true. Any takers?
Firefox
Mozilla Firefox
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
If you haven’t heard about Firefox by now you must have just been un-thawed from your 100 year cryochamber, “yeah baby”.
Firebug
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
If you need to find out what CSS class is applied to an element, HTML hiding in a part of a page, change your HTML on the fly, debug your JavsScript, then this is the tool to download. Once you have it you’ll wonder how you lived without it.
Web Developer Plugin
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
This is and Firebug are tied for being the most important plugins any web developer can have. It will allow you validate your HTML and CSS against the W3C validation engines, view information about everything regarding your pages, disable JavaScript, disable cookies, the list goes on and on.
Live HTTP Headers
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3829
This plugin is very similar to Fiddler for IE and has most of the same features and just like Fiddler can be called directly from the browser.
ColorZilla
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/271
This plugin is great for grabbing the HEX code for a part of a page you are looking at. After install click the color dropper icon in the bottom left, click the color you want to copy, right click the color dropper icon and select your option.
DownThemAll!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/201
Great when you need to grab a number of files on one page all at once, instead of right clicking, save as. You can apply regular expression filters for file types that are not listed in the available file types. Huge time saver if you are migrating content from an old site to a new one for a client, especially if you don’t have FTP access.
FoxMarks
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2410
If you have ever been in the situation where you wish you had the same bookmarks on all your computers this plugin will take care of the syncronization. It even supports password sync for all of your saved passwords.
IE Tab
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419
I try to keep as few applications open at the same time to keep my desktop clean. This plugin will allow you to switch between Firefox and IE with one mouse click. You can set filters to only use IE for certains sites as well as other options as well.
Website Utilities
HTTrack
http://www.httrack.com/
This application is useful in situations you need to copy a website, such as your client’s, and they no longer have FTP access or you need an HTML version of your dynamic site.
Xenu
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
Find your 404 pages and where the links are coming from with this tool.
Zoom Indexer – Commerical
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/
This application will allow you to create a web site search page that can track searches, display featured links, set weight on certain types of content, create Google XML sitemaps and index offline files such as PDF, doc, txt, xls and more.
SiteUptime – Free – Premium
http://www.siteuptime.com/
This website will track your website uptime and report when there are outages. The free account will track one website, you will need to purchase a premium account to track more sites or if you need more frequent monitor intervals.
BK ReplaceEM
http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/BK-ReplaceEm-Download-44103.html
This isn’t really a website utility but is great when you need to change some code across multiple files at once.
Website Security
HP Scawler
https://download.spidynamics.com/products/scrawlr/
This tool will help you find any obvious SQL Injection vulnerabilties for a query string based web site. By that I mean if your site uses the old standard for sending values to your application, ie. page.aspx?id=1234. It does not work on sites that use rewriting and hides the query string, ie. /page/1234. Remember to always use parameters or escape your values.
HTACCESS Generator
http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/password/
This site will create the .htaccess and .htpasswd information you need to password protect a folder on a Unix or Linux server. I will write a post on how to create an .htaccess and .htpasswd pair for Windows servers.
