Most all web development I’ve done over the past couple years has been self-taught – online courses, tutorials, and friends have all given me invaluable knowledge to apply to my skillset. There are also a few essential tools I’ve come to love in my work and learning. Here’s five of them.

1. Firefox
   I’m a huge fan of Firefox.  It’s strength is it’s Add-ons – small useful little ‘plug ins‘ that you can use to ‘personalize your browsing experience’.  Installing them is as simple as clicking the little ‘Add to Firefox’ button on the page of the Add-on you are looking at.  Here’s three of my faves to get you started:
   • Web Developer Extension
     This extension has been one of the most valuable extensions ever made for me.  It’s allowed me to understand the content and structure of HTML and CSS like no other.  I’m particularly fond of it’s ‘live editing’ feature which allows you to edit the CSS of web pages in a sidepane – live – so you can see the results immediately.
   • Colorzilla
     Colorzilla is a handy extension that can extract the color information form any page.  You can then use this to do color matching in your CSS as well as other graphics/photo-editing programs like Photoshop or Illustrator.
   • Measureit
     Measureit allows you to “Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.”
2. CyberDuck
   Cyberduck is an open source FTP and SFTP client for Mac OS X. You can easily drag n’ drop files to and from your server using a GUI.  Handy if you’re not into using the command-line (though ideally, as a web developer, you do know how to use the command-line. Right?
3. Text Wrangler
   Text Wrangler is a great code-editor for CSS, PHP and other kinds of files used for web and other programming environments.  It’s great for web developers and server admins.  Has nice integration with your server with a ‘Save to FTP/SFTP Server…’ option in the file menu.
4. Stickies
   Who doesn’t need a quick way to post random bits of information and code that you may only need once? Stickies does this.  Come default on all Mac OSX systems.  You can download it for PC here.
5. del.icio.us
   Sometimes as I’m developing, I encounter some technical hurdle, bug or glitch – figuring out whether it’s actually a bug or something I’m just not seeing is sometimes half the work!  These times take me to the internet to go and look something up and if I find something useful, I bookmark it.  That way, if someone I work with/train in the future encounters the same problem, I can refer to the bookmark.  Friend and colleague Ben Sheldon said it best – I use the internet to help me remember stuff so I don’t have to;)

These are just the tools that I use.  I didn’t put coffee or iTunes in the list, though these are usually quite essential too;)  What kinds of tools do you use?  Do you use the above tools in any innovative ways?

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