Great Articles Elsewhere: February 15 to February 22

This is a fantastic resource for one of the best free tools out there — the Web Developer extension for the Firefox web browser. This extension installs a toolbar in Firefox that lets you do dozens of cool and useful things, from disabling the CSS on a website to see how the page is structured (one of my favorite things to do), to measuring screen elements with the built-in ruler.

One of the most time consuming portions of developing any new website, for me, is the tweaking of the text. I make a tiny adjustment, reload the page, try another change, and so on. But with CSS Type Set, you can skip a lot of that busywork. Their simple and intuitive user interface makes it a snap to test out hundreds of different typeface variations on-the-fly. Then, when you have your text looking just the way you want it, you can simply copy and paste their generated CSS into your style sheet.

This is a great collection of Blueprint resources compiled by my major professor of yesteryear, Dr. Lee Honeycutt. Blueprint, if you’re not aware, is a sort of CSS ‘framework’ that has been developed to help you build complex websites more quickly by providing the labor-intensive portion of the work (laying out columns, etc) up front. If you’d like to learn more about Blueprint, there are several links in Dr. Honeycutt’s collection which will help you do just that.