Top Ten Firefox Addons For Power Blogging And Web Development - Friday Top Ten #2
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Welcome to the second edition of the Friday Top Ten. The first one was about Top 10 Tools for Digg. Enjoy this one! 
Firefox is the beloved web browser of many webdevelopers, bloggers and the like. It also has thousands of addons and extensions at the ready for incorporation into the browser.
For today’s list, I’m going to share with you my top ten extensions I use to make my blogging and web development a whole lot easier. Here we go! (in no particular order):
1: Delicious Bookmarks
This extension brings Delicious to your browser. It’s fantastic for quick saving. It integrates into the Firefox bookmarks, and whenever you bookmark a page in Firefox, you can automatically add it to your Delicious saved pages too!
So, in effect, this extension brings Delicious over to me, instead of me having to go there. Highly Recommended!
2: FireShot
As a blogger, I often have to take snapshots for illustrations. What better than FireShot to do that? FireShot is a screen capturing addon for Firefox, with many editing options. You can capture either the visible portion of the page, or the whole page and then edit it(crop, fill, etc).
FireShot also adds a button next to the search bar and context menu, for quick access. This addon is recommended too.
3: Copy As HTML Link
We as bloggers, have a lot of linking to do. But, linking can be cumbersome. Select the anchor text first, and then wrap it around with the URL and href tag. Hard work.
Enter the Copy as HTML Link addon for Firefox. What it does is that it allows you to select some text, and it automatically wraps the href tag and the URL of the current page, to make it a ready made HTML link, copied to your clipboard.
4: TinyURL Creator
Who doesn’t want to cut long links to short ones for use? But who wants to go to sites like TinyURL to shorten their URLs when you can do it right from your browser?
The TinyURL Creator is a Firefox addon that adds a Create TinyURL button to the context menu, and once created, the TinyURL is automatically copied to the clipboard, ready for use. Neat!
5: StumbleUpon Toolbar
The toolbar for my favourite social media service, this toolbar has all a bored blogger (or average internet user) needs. I find tons of great content ideas by pressing the ‘Stumble!’ button, and I share what I like, and what I don’t. Highly Recommended.
6: Web Developer
The mother of all web development extensions for Firefox, the Web Developer is the addon for any web developer. With a huge number of tools such as color information, div order, image paths, stylesheets, cookies, etc, it can dissect a whole web page, so the rest is easy for you.
7: Firebug
Firebug is another fantastic addon for webdevelopers. It can display HTTP header information about a page, and you can monitor things like HTML, JavaScript and CSS live on any page. Fantastic!
8: Dummy Lipsum
Those ‘Lorem Ipsum..’ lines are often used as dummy text to symbolize real text, for web development purposes. The Dummy Lipsum Firefox extension makes the job of adding those lines easier, by filling in a text box with some lipsum text. This extension adds a button to the context menu, and when you right-click inside a text-box, you can insert the lipsum text there.
9: ScribeFire Blog Editor
Who doesn’t know the ScribeFire blog editor? It is a Firefox extension that seamlessly integrates into Firefox, and lets you post to your blog. It supports many blog platforms, such as WordPress and Blogger. You can add pictures and formatting too, to jazz up your post.
10: Shareaholic
Shareaholic is an addon for the social junkies. Like a page you just visited? Share it with your friends!
Shareaholic allows you to email a page to your friends, and share the page on many social media sites, like Facebook, Digg, Delicious, and so on. So, share on!
YOUR Favourites
I blurted out my favourite blogging and web development addons for Firefox. Now, its your turn. What would be your top ten, or even top five?
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You forgot Last Tab :
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/112
If you have windows and are used to the ALT TAB, you’re going to love this extension !
Excellent list Siyab
I love the tinyurl addon.
Great post, Muhammad. For people like me who have the insatiable need to make their blog look pretty and keep writing content, this list is more than useful.
I’d like to add a couple of add-ons to list. First, the IE Tab add-on, which allows you to use the Internet Explorer rendering engine on Firefox instead of having to keep opening IE to check how your site will look in there. Of course, this list was more concentrated on blogging tools and not ones for webdev, but still I had to point it out. I should tell you that it slows the browser down a bit. Here’s a link to the add-on.
I’d also like to point out that I use the is.gd URL tinifier instead of TinyURL, since it produces shorter URLs. Here’s a link to their add-on.
Hey, Dean, thanks for the suggestions.
I know about both of them. The IE one could be really useful for webdevelopment.
I have the is.gd URL shortener activated too right now. But I thought one service to shorten URLs was enough…
Thanks for the links: maybe I’ll include these two later on
I vote for IETab for IE bugfixing and is.gd for it is shorter, and TinyURL seems to be not-so-short nowadays.
But seriously, why is Fireshot in there? I prefer Snagit for two reasons - convenient editing, and ability to capture pretty much everything.
Great post, Muhammad! You included several that I hadn’t heard of before — and have now added — ESPECIALLY Copy as HTML Link! Thanks!
Another add-on I like is Zemanta, which suggests links related to what you’re blogging on that can offer useful information or even a “related link” link!
Thanks for another great post!
Joan
Sumesh, Joan, thanks for the comments.
Sumesh, I didn’t know about Snagit. I’ll check it out
Joan, that could be very useful. Thanks for the link!
Nice list!
I haven’t thought of looking for screen shot addons! I’ll be giving FireShot a try. I recently wrote a similar article on my blog. My all time favorite addon would have to be Adblock Plus. It does a fabulous job of getting rid of ads!
Hey Kenneth, thanks for dropping by.
Adblock is good, but I don’t feel the need to use it.. probably because I’m ‘ad tolerant’
