Taking Screen shots from the browser : Firefox and Internet Explorer

It is not every day I am speechless about a firefox plug-in, but I just have to let more people know about this one.

FireShot

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5648

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Quote from the site :

FireShot is a Firefox extension that creates screenshots of web pages. Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify captures and insert text and graphical annotations. Such functionality will be especially useful for web designers, testers and content reviewers. It's possible to choose whether entire web page or only visible part of this page should be captured. Screenshots can be saved to disk (PNG, JPEG, BMP), copied to clipboard, e-mailed and sent to external editor for further processing.
Adds the ability to take a screenshot of web page (entire of visible part), edit it, add annotations and save (PNG, JPEG, BMP), copy to clipboard, send to external editor or e-mail it.

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Having worked in an environment where people need to make changes to web sites, or even easily take a screen shot, this product it worth its weight in gold. This example shows how easy it is to draw over the page, and have it saved as an image.



If you are using IE, and want to take a screen shot from the browser I also suggest looking at :

IE Screenshot

http://www.browsertweaks.com/screenshot.html

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Quote from the Site :

Do you like to make screenshots of Web pages that you've visited? What can you do about pages that are longer than one screen? Use IE Screenshot! With a single click, IE Screenshot makes a copy of a full page (no matter how long it is) and saves it as an image file. IE Screenshot scrolls around the page taking shots which it later stitches together.
The free version of IE Screenshot will let you save screenshots as bitmaps (BMPs) only. Using the program is simple - just click the IE Screenshot button and specify a filename. If you require extended functions for saving screenshots in other popular formats GIF, JPG, PNG, etc., stamping text on screenshots, or e-mailing a screenshot to others via the Internet

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Google sending application/xhtml+xml and Firefox gets a XML Parsing Error

One of the problems using a handful of Firefox Add-ons is one day something isn’t going to work. And today that was google.com.au not working for me.
Using the Live Headers, I could see that Google was sending application/xhtml+xml headers. Because their meta tag wasn’t closed, it was causing firefox to display the XML Parsing Error.

Live HTTP Headers

Firefox XML Parse Error

Force Content Type

Using the Force Content Type Add-On I am able to change the Content header from application/xhtml+xml to text/html


That wasn't too hard to fix, as I wasn't prepared to spend a good amount of time disabling Firefox Add-ons, and could still use everything I needed and wanted.

To see what Firefox Add-ons I use, check out my previous post : All we need is another 20+ Must have Firefox extensions

When is a file.rss not an actual .rss file?

When the Header sent back is Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Using Live HTTP Headers Firefox Add On https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3829

I could see Apache was treating my filename.rss files as normal text. Modifying the .htaccess file to treat the .rss files correctly, I made the following modification :

# Set up correct header for the rss files

AddType application/rss+xml .rss

Now checking out the reply header, it now sends back the correct header

Content-Type: application/rss+xml

Now my problem is checking with Google using the allinurl and site filters I can see almost 5000+ are indexed. I am not sure if I should be a little concerned, as I would rather search engine traffic go to the site, rather than the rss feed. Also duplicate content could become an issue.

I would of thought Google would of known not to add a rss feed to their main search results, as the files began with :

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<rss version='2.0'>
<channel>
<title>blah...</title>
....

So now I guess only time will tell if I get more of my RSS files indexed, or not.

To find out how many files I had listed, I used to following search (replaced sitename of course)

allinurl:www.sitename.com site:www.sitename.com .rss

All we need is another 20+ Must have Firefox extensions

I get asked a lot which Firefox extensions I use. OK not really, but I just needed to keep them as a list, so I know what to install next time I have to work on a PC with only IE installed.

All we need is another "20+ Must have Firefox extensions list for the Web Developer". With Forecastfox making the list it cannot be too serious. Also are they still called extensions or Add-ons?

Name of Extension	Image	Why I use it
Adblock Plus		Yes I do block ads. There I said it. This was one of the extensions that first got me using firefox.
Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper		Lets me hide more. A companion extension for Adblock Plus
ColorfulTabs		I usually have open 10+ tabs in Firefox, so the Colour makes the Tabs a little easier to read.
ColorZilla		Gives me the colour RGB and HEX values.
del.icio.us buttons		I am now hooked on bookmarking and tags. This lets me to easily tag pages, and bookmark sites that I probably wont ever visit again.
Fasterfox		I don't use this as much as I used to, but the timer it has shows me how long the pages take to load.
Firebug		I don't leave home without this one. It is great for trouble shotting web site problems. This is usually always open on in my Dual Montior set up.
Font Finder		Used to help my identify which fonts a web site uses. very helpfull it it is hidden deep in the CSS.
Force Content Type		I use this when I want to view an XML file in the browser, but the site is sending me the wrong headers
Forecastfox		I like to know what the weather is outside. Sure I might not actually go outside, but its handy to know that Melbourne is Mostly Cloudy and 11 degrees.
Greasemonkey		I use this a for a couple of sites
Html Validator		Another one I don't leave home without this one. Although now I am getting to the point where Warnings are fine, its the red cross I need to worry about.
IE Tab		I have it, but don't use it. Generally I just open up IE itself. One of the advantages of a dual monitor set up.
Javascript Debugger		its makes debugging Javascript that little bit easier.
Live HTTP Headers		I need to see what HTTP headers are.
MeasureIt		Sure there is a Ruler in the web developer extension (Miscellaneous -> Display Ruler) But I like this one.
MinimizeToTray		I have it installed, but I use Power Menu now. So I guess I should really disable this one.
PDF Download		Because sometimes it is easier to download the PDF
Session Manager		In a perfect world I wouldn't need this, but on the odd occasion my brower does crash, this lets me resume where I left off.
Stylish		Great for testing out a style sheet, without actually uploading. Not used much recently, but was a great tool to move the Digg page around when the site changed layouts
Tab Mix Plus		Gives me a little more options for the Tabs.
User Agent Switcher		Yes I used this to make my browser look like the iPhone a couple months before it was released, and I hit all the Apple sites I could find. Sorry to all those who got excited when they saw (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A537a Safari/418.4) in their logs. Now I use it to test out my mobile / wap pages.
Web Developer		This is the first extension I install. I mainly use the "Information -> View Color Information" on web sites to figure out what my homes paint colour scheme should be.
wmlbrowser		Lets me browse wml (Wap) sites in my browser. Really need to use this with User Agent Switcher for full effect.
XHTML Mobile Profile		Another tool to help test out Mobile Phone designed web sites.
YSlow		Great new tool from the folks at Yahoo. Used with Firebug. Not too sure if I like it yet, as it just means I know have proof my web sites are too slow, have too many javascript files and are sites get Ranked "F". It really should grade on the curve.

About the Author: I run the some small websites in my spare time. I started doing web development when geocities was cool, hotmail didn't belong to microsoft, having an ICQ number 3096077 was cool, and used Netscape Gold for its HTML editing capabilities.