I’ve found some great plugins that you should be using if you are serious about growing your Wordpress blog.

After activating and setting up the basics, you should begin to explore some of the plugins that are available to you.

First, you want your blog to be set up favorably for the search engines so I suggest you visit All in One SEO Pack, download and install it so you begin automatically being attractive to search engines.

Another essential matter is setting up a backup so you don’t lose your blog if some catastrophe were to happen.  You can use WP Backup for this and I configure mine to be sent to my email automatically.  This means I don’t even have to think about it.

There is also a Feedburner Plugin to redirect your blogs feed to feedburner.  This saves you bandwidth and also gives you statistics like how many people are reading your blog, etc.

There are more plugins that are pretty essential but this should keep you busy for a while.

In the last post I discussed some Firefox add-ons that I thought you might find handy in your work as a web designer or web developer.

Today, I’m going to pull a few more out of my bag of magic tricks and see if you think they’re as neat as I do.

1. Xray - Once installed the X-Ray command is available by right-clicking or you can access it in the Tools menu.

When applied to a page it can help you see how the document was constructed without having to go back and forth between the sourcecode and the page in your browser. Is that list made of li, dd or p elements?

Is that an h3 tag or just some bolded text?  Aha, X-Ray shows you what’s beneath the surface of the page.

2. Palette Grabber - Creates a color palette for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, Flash, Fireworks, Paint.NET, or OS X based on the current page.  I’m sure it will work, also, in Gimp Shop, a hack that makes Gimp look and feel like PhotoShop.

3. Firebug - Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a ton of development tools at your fingertips while you are browsing. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

With these add-ons, you should be able to work much faster and with more insight.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you like and/or dislike about the add-ons.  We can even start to collect other add-ons as you suggest them for future posts.

Firefox presently is my favorite browser for web designers because of the seemingly unlimited amount of add-ons available.

It’s amazing just how many add-ons I run across each week and just don’t have time to check them all out.  With that in mind, I thought I’d check out a few and report on the good ones for you.

These add-ons make your web designing jobs easier and faster because they contain useful tools that you’d normally have to open a software program to have access to, so they’ll save you some time.

Here’s a  list of Firefox add-ons that I used in my web development projects, you’re welcome to comment on any you don’t like or suggest ones that you might be currently using in your work.

1. Web Developers Toolbar - This is an ideal tool for web designers as well as developers. It contains tools such as CSS displays, Edit Forms, Tools for mark-up Validation (W3C, CSS, HTML etc.)

2. IE-Tab - This is very helpful to web developers since you can easily switch between IE and Firefox. This is a great alternative for browsershots.org

3. MeasureIT - Need a ruler or need to measure an element in an existing website. This tool will become handy.

Ok, that’s it for today.  We will look at more tools in the next installment.

In the meantime, you can click on the hyperlinks and check out each of the tools to see if they’re something you’d be likely to use in your work.

I think they’re all good to have on hand as you are designing and developing websites for yourself or someone else.

In the next post, I’ll look at XRay, Pallette Grabber and Firebug.

RSSHugger is located at http://www.rsshugger.com and is a new website developed to help bloggers promote their blogs, and to help visitors discover new blogs that write about subjects that interest them. Through the power of the internet marketing and viral marketing, rssHugger brings blog writers and readers closer together.

Here’s how it works.

If you own a blog, you can get your own page on rssHugger for 10 years for giving an honest review of the site on your blog, such as I am doing here.

If you want to join rssHugger but do not want to review our site, you can pay a one time review fee of $20. rssHugger will be the first ever quality, spam free, and viral rss directory strictly for bloggers.

After you have signed up, write a blog post about rssHugger as per the agreement and make sure to include your rssHugger blog page in your post.

The more visitors you send to your page, the higher you will rank on the Top 100 page of rsshugger.

To keep the playing field level for everyone, the Top 100 blogs page resets everyone back to zero on the 1st of every month. This will allow those that regularly participate or promote their page on rssHugger to get a lot more promotion in return for their efforts.

If you want to keep your rssHugger blog page ranking high at all times, it is suggested that you might want to add your page to your Blogroll, or make a monthly post informing your readers about the website.

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