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  • Web tools that can save you days of work

    published on 5/18/2008 10:35 AM

    One of my primary positions is currently in building and maintaining our web pages. The original system I built was using plain asp.net 2.0. But we didn't plan on just how much the project would grow and the requirements with that. So the lack of flexibility made us take the jump into [url:DotNetNuke|http://www.dotnetnuke.com]. It was more work than planed but now 30+ modules and 20+ web sites later I feel it was well worth it. It's nice to have a system that our customers can change and expand as they want. Some really utilize this and changes their webpage daily with new promotions and news. Something that we had to get involved with and do for them before. Helping our customers get up to speed usually ends up on my table and I'm surprise as how few people actually knows about a few critical web tools. The most important one that I simply can't live without anymore is [url:firebug|http://www.getfirebug.com]. It's simply the best web tool out there and if you only ever use one web tool this year it should be that one. Not only does it help you find any html tags on a page it allows you to change the values of the tags in realtime. It even lets you debug javascript code. Sadly so is this a Firefox only tool and of course the most bugs you get and the most strange behavior you get is in IE. But they lack anything as sophisticated as firebug. The [url:IE Dev toolbar|http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e59c3964-672d-4511-bb3e-2d5e1db91038&displaylang=en] does exists so your not completely left out in the cold but it's not as good as firebug.

    One of the more annoying bugs I found in IE was the question why I had a small gap below an image. Well after a lot of digging it turned out to be a single left space before a tag as in "> ". Apparently Microsoft thinks encoding spaces as   is too difficult and instead uses the space if there is one.

    Still even with these tools you can and will run into very annoying issues and down right bugs so the last 'tool' is patience, lots and lots of patience.