rvdavid: A Web Developer's Blog

A periodical blog of experiences from the angle of an autodidactic, paranoid and narcissistic web developer…

Archive for November, 2007

My Web Development Firefox Extensions

November 27th, 2007

This is just a quick, minimal list of what firefox extensions I install for use in my day to day Web Development work. While some of the extensions may not be related to Web Development, they could be seen as essential convenience extensions.

Here’s the top ten in the order of how I install them (I’m not going to do a countdown as it’s so very “the late show with David Letterman”) on a brand new installation of Firefox on Ubuntu, Windows, Fedora or any other operating System that supports Firefox.
» Read more: My Web Development Firefox Extensions

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Posted in Web Development

Tags: firebug

Good Online JavaScript Encoding & CSS Compression tools

November 26th, 2007

As I was looking at shrinking the CSS and JavaScript files DevScripts from 60+kb and 70+kb respectively, I found a couple of helpful of good tools to keep handy when you’re dropping your projects into production.

To compress javascript I used the Code and Coffee online JavaScript compression/encoding tool, and for cleaning up the CSS, I used CleanCSS which was sent to me by a former colleague.
» Read more: Good Online JavaScript Encoding & CSS Compression tools

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Posted in Links

Tags: css javascript

Quick Linux Shell Script Example

November 22nd, 2007

When I first moved to linux I had become addicted to keeping my distro updated and so I found myself typing and retyping

$ sudo aptitude update
password:
$ sudo aptitude dist-upgrade

At least once a day. Having read about shell scripts, I thought I’d try my hand at putting this into a shell script which, if you don’t already know, is linux’ more powerful answer to the Windows batch file.

So that’s what I did, and here’s how I did it.

1 comment »

Posted in Ubuntu

Tags: Linux shell script Ubuntu

Enable SSH Access to Xubuntu

November 19th, 2007

Well, I’ve been playing around with Xubuntu Linux for a while now and I have been making extensive use of SSH. If you haven’t heard of SSH yet, here’s a quick rundown from wikipedia:

SSH is typically used to log into a remote machine and execute commands, but it also supports tunneling, forwarding arbitrary TCP ports and X11 connections; it can transfer files using the associated SFTP or SCP protocols.

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Posted in Linux

Making the backspace key in Firefox a shortcut key to go back in Ubuntu!

November 19th, 2007

Coming from Windows a few months ago, one of the things I took for granted was the backspace key being a shortcut key for the back button on my web browser – Firefox.

Once I shifted over to Ubuntu, this shortcut was missing from a default installation. If you want to replicate how the Firefox web browser on Windows has mapped the backspace key to go back a page on linux based systems, do the following:

Open up firefox
In the address bar, type about:config *this should give you a payload of preferences going down the page*
Once this happens, enter the word “backspace” in the filter field, this should narrow your entry to one that says browser.backspace_action.
Double click on the entry and change the value to 0 instead of 1.

The change should be immediate, so if you now press the [Backspace] key, it functions as a back button. I must have done this a several times when I was installing and reinstalling distributions as I messed around with my installations, but kept forgetting how to do it.