Web developer toolbar

The Web Developer Extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser.

For anyone who uses Firefox that’s interested in accessibility and CSS web development, this is an essential must-have for testing web pages!

Click here to download the web developer toolbar.

Web accessibility toolbar

The web accessibility toolbar is available for Internet Explorer.

It can perform virtually any accessibility test on a web page, such as HTML and CSS validation, colour checking, HTML structure analysis, and much, much more!

Click here to download the web accessibility toolbar.

Firebug

Firebug is an extension to the Firefox web browser and is an indispensable tool to any web developer.

It allows to view, inspect and edit HTML, CSS and JavaScript live on any web page as well helping to debug a large number of potential problems.

Click here to download the Firebug extension.

Yslow

Yslow is a plug-in which is integrated with the Firebug web extension for Firefox.

It’s a great tool to help reduce the number of HTTP requests needed to render a page.

It analyses the web page and summarises the page’s components, displays statistics and suggests ways to improve its performance.

Click here to download the Yslow extension.

Fangs

Fangs is an extension to the Firefox web browser.

It renders a text version of a web page similar to how a screen reader would read it. It also provides a list of headings and links that are on the page. It helps to quickly find out if there are any accessibility issues on a web page for screen reader users.

Click here to download the Fangs extension.

Aardvark

Aardvark is an add-on for Firefox browser.

It outlines any elements over which you hover your cursor and displays the HTML tags and the CSS styles of the elements selected.

It also has one fantastic feature that makes it worth installing – a page clean-up prior to printing. Simply select the area of the page you want to print (usually the main content area) and it’ll ensure that only this gets printed, resizing it perfectly on to the paper.

Click here to download the Aardvark extension.

IE tester

IETester is a free web browser that contains different versions of Internet Explorer, from 5.5 through to 8.

Now you can test websites in multiple versions of Internet Explorer all through just one browser!

Click here to download the IE tester program.

Windows magnifier

It’s essentially just a very basic screen magnifier bundled in with Windows XP.

It is great if you want to quickly check how your site looks through a screen magnifier.

Check out this program on your PC at Start > Programs > Accessories > Accessibility > Magnifier.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Xenu is a handy freeware tool that checks for any broken links on a site.

Simply type in a URL and it will check the links on every single page of the website.

Dead links can come about due to links on external websites going down, a file being moved or someone typing in the wrong URL. Whatever the reason, Xenu will find those dead links for you and tell you on which pages they are on. Isn’t that great!?

Click here to download Xenu’s Link checker.

Dust-Me selectors

The Dust-Me Selectors is an extension for Firefox web browser.

It lists all the used/unused CSS selectors from all the stylesheets on a web site. It’s a handy tool when times come to tidy up and reduce files size.

Click here to download the Dust-Me extension.

Conclusion

It can be difficult to decide on which plug-ins and extensions to use as a developer, but this list should point you in the direction of some really helpful tools. Having these programs in your arsenal could help you out no end when it comes to developing, monitoring, evaluating and debugging web pages.

This article was written by Brigitte Simard a web developer at the user experience consultancy, Webcredible. Brigitte’s passionate about improving the accessibility of websites and is responsible for a variety of CSS design projects and accessible CMS implementations.

Found via Mr. K, Google has announced the launch of a new tool to track how Google views your website, ecommerce site or blog from a loading perspective. The tool is available within the Google Labs section of the Google Webmaster Tools service. The tool is called “Site Performance” and actually displays some interesting information.

Google notes, “Studies have repeatedly shown that speeding up your site leads to increased user retention and activity, higher revenue and lower costs. Towards the goal of making every webpage load as fast as flipping the pages of a magazine, we have provided articles on best practices, active discussion forums and many tools to diagnose and fix speed issues.”

The tool shows you how long it takes Google to load your pages and includes the details on total size, number of requests and domain lookups.

As the announcement post notes, the tool also shows you example pages and edits you could make to have the page load faster. In my tests, it says I should:

• combine CSS
• reduce domain lookups
• Enable gzip compression
• serve resources from a consistent URL

Give the tool a try and leave a comment with the suggestions the Site Performance tool suggests for your website.

TweetMeme

TweetMeme creator Nick Halstead posted several messages on Twitter – the last one coming 12 hours ago. He has three posts related to the outage:

• we are having a problem with our DNS for TweetMeme – we are trying to get it fixed ASAP
• .@Fasthosts your going to have some SERIOUS bad press soon unless you sort out problems out
• anyone know people at internic? we need help with a DNS issue ASAP

Twitter users are also posting about the TweetMeme outage. Apparently there is a full TweetMeme site that shows off the most popular stories based on who clicks the button the most. While the API didn’t load yesterday, for most of the day the main site did load as I noticed a couple of tech blogs up on the home page. As of the time of this posting, the main site was unaccessible as well. It appears that the main TweetMeme twitter account is working although the stream seems slow.

TweetMeme was in the news last week with the launch of “retweetable ads”.

You might use this down time to start to plan your Black Friday shopping. I wonder if this is affecting traffic to the Twitter-heavy blogs.

Update 10AM Eastern: The TweetMeme site is back – it appears you can now find all of the techcrunch and mashable stories on their home page once again.

Here’s Yahoo’s description of Hack Days: “Yahoo! Hack Days started back in 2005, when a team of engineers designed an event to see what sort of interesting and innovative applications people would build using Yahoo! tools and technologies over a 24-hour period. At the end of the day, they presented working hacks to roomful of colleagues and peers. Since then, “hack” has become an integral part of culture at Yahoo!. ”

The sessions run through the night and you can nap at the conference center. They say there will be lots of “geek food” – let’s just hope they don’t bring any Twitter cupcakes – we all know how those ended up for me :)

I am hoping we will learn why we should use Yahoo tools and developer platforms over their Google counterparts.

Michael Grynbaum from the NY Times has a great story today about the progress that’s been made with the MTA in opening up the schedule data. Complaints against two web developers have been dropped. Grynbaum discusses how a variety of cities across the U.S. share their schedule and transit data with the public. Up north, Toronto held a “transit camp” in 2007 to help create a better TTC website.

At the end of the column, there’s a comment from Internet law expert Jonathan Zittrain who noted, “I love that the subversive act of the 21st century in the subway is not graffiti, but mapping out the stations so you can know where to exit the car. Twenty years ago they would have been tagging the cars. In both cases, the city is upset.”

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has talked about his ideas for Media2020, a program that is supposed to make NYC more competitive in media and to create more entrepreneurial growth. Bloomberg’s ads for his supposed transit plan appear all over the Web and on TV — embracing the developer and entrepreneurial communities would make for a much stronger transit system.

Let’s hope that all transit systems across the world embrace technology to make travel easier. Maybe then we will see more cool visualizations of transit usage,  more apps like Exit Strategy,  and more mashups that track trains and their travels. I’d also love to see a transit camp here in NYC as long as the MTA participates as well. In my travels as a rail fan, it’s amazing to learn how much knowledge rail fans hold that could make the system better for passengers – imagine bringing together those who know  the system best, the best developers and entrepreneurs and the government to create the next generation of transit here in NYC.

Today there are a variety of services that make it easier to archive content around a term or product. A new offering from Portland-based Iterasi launching today is hoping to do the job even better. The service is named Positive Press and is setup to capture, archive and report on any content across the Web. The core of the product is Iterasi’s archiving service which saves actual web pages from the time of the save including all contents. I spoke with CEO Pete Grillo who showed me that you can even archive full RSS feeds and the archive is of the webpages that the stories are from not just the plain RSS content.

Positive Press can also archive Twitter messages in the full Twitter style and the messages are retained for all time. It’s very simple to use – just enter a search term and any time that term is used on twitter, Positive Press will archive it. Apparently Twitter only saves 30-days of messages.

The service is perfect for brands and agencies that need to monitor remarks across the web. The service also offers a reports feature which can send on-demand and scheduled reports via email that include the content generated by the archive feature over a specific time period.

As a side note, no matter what tool you use for monitoring, if you have a product or service you must monitor all press so you can respond if needed. If you are working with an agency they better be providing you with reports – if not, find a new agency.

The Positive Press service starts at $99/month. Iterasi’s free service will remain and will be rebranded as Iterasi Personal. Check out additional views on Positive Press from Josh Lowensohn of CNET and Charles Hamilton of WWD.

Here’s an overview of how the service works:

In my new role I see a lot of websites that are clunkers. Many of the sites haven’t been touched in a decade, are broken, are out-of-date, missing any current functionality or aren’t indexed in Google. How many dollars of revenue are these businesses losing out on because their website is a clunker?

I am not even talking about any sort of social networking or social media optimization. Just simple updates so that the sites are usable and, more importantly, findable. By investing in creating better small business websites, the local economy will benefit which in turn will provide more jobs and strengthen local businesses for the long term. Some of the concept overlaps with Robert Scoble’s 2010 web concept.

With that I’d like to introduce the concept of the “Cash for Clunkers Website Edition”. I’ve posted my initial thoughts on the concept and program in my Information Week column. Have a look at the concept and let me know your thoughts!

Doodle and MyDoodle will remain free while the Doodle Premium will cost $28/year. Basically Doodle Premium allows the user to customize the look and feel of the site. It’s a way to personalize the events that Doodle users create and send to their participants. The price seems a bit on the high side as $9 or $14 feels about right but I am sure the Doodle team researched the right price. Pricing is always the hardest part of any business, whether web-based or brick-and-mortar.

The company also notes that Premium Doodle is ad-free and customers can also request personal information from their event participants, such as postal address, e-mail address, and phone number.

Their “lifeboat” is a new offering they are near completion on which will allow Geocities users to transfer their sites into Jimdo. The basic Jimdo service is free and you can upgrade to JimdoPro for $5/month. JimdoPro offers more detailed statistics, larger storage space, personalized domain name, and no ads.

They are offering Geocities’ (and Google Pages) users 10% off the JimdoPro fee. This is a smart move for Jimdo as it makes them look like heros for helping users of a system that is closing.

From the overview, "Using three years of daily Web traffic data, and new models adapted from financial mathematics, this talk examines large-scale variation in Web traffic. These data show that Web traffic is highly heteroskedastic, with smaller sites having orders of magnitude more variation in the relative number of visitors they receive. These consistent patterns allow us to provide reasonable estimates of how likely it is Google will still be the most visited US site a year from now".

Dr. Hindman talks about rank volatility, items that are missing from traffic, the audience distribution curves for newspapers and news/media websites, and how big media plays musical chairs and how those chairs might affect staffing levels in the future. He also looks at whether the Web and online media can help save newspapers.

It’s 45 minutes long and while Hitwise data is not perfect, the analysis is worth the time.

Twitter, for instance, is the perfect example of the prototypical Web 2.0 startup that has captured the hearts and minds of the Web 2.0 "community" but hasn’t captured any real money (outside of venture capital).

When confronted with questions about the financial viability of their hottest startups, Web 2.0 proponents usually have a similar response: Rome wasn’t built in a day. When Google launched, we’re reminded, it didn’t know how exactly how it was going to make money. For young Web 2.0 startups that are growing rapidly, we’re often told that growth and "critical mass" are more important than revenue models and profitability.

As we recently learned that Digg was still losing money on revenue numbers that look quite paltry, it occurred to me that Digg and some of Web 2.0’s other hot young startups really aren’t hot young startups anymore.

Facebook was launched in February 2004. Digg was launched in November 2004. Twitter was launched in July 2006. Facebook is almost five years old, Digg is just over four years old and Twitter is two and a half years old.

They all share a common trait: none has developed into a self-sustaining business whose financial future seems assured.

But Rome wasn’t built in a day, right?

When Google launched to the public in 1998, AdWords wasn’t a part of the "business plan." Yet in 2001 – the third year of its existence – Google was already turning a profit. In an August 2001 BBC article, it was reported Google had been in the black for the past two quarters and that the company wasn’t making a little bit of cash – it was making a lot of it.

Eric Schmidt’s words: "We are quite profitable. We are not talking about 1%."

And what of other brands created during Bubble 1.0 that went on to grow into large enterprises? eBay was profitable almost right from the start.

According to an old press release, Yahoo reported a negligible profit in Q4 of 2005 – before it went public. Yahoo was officially incorporated as a business on March 1, 1995.

In short, three of the most prominent creations of the first .com boom were able to generate revenue and profits much faster than their Web 2.0 counterparts.

This is quite curious for two primary reasons.

The Myth of the Lean, Mean Startup

One of Web 2.0’s biggest myths: it’s far easier and far cheaper to get a startup off the ground today than it was a decade ago.

Citing the wide range of mature, open-source technologies and the abundance of talent available today, Web 2.0 proponents have told us that taking an idea from concept to reality, getting it launched and growing it can be a cheap affair.

If that’s the case, one would logically assume that today’s Web 2.0 startups would have developed into lean, mean revenue-generating machines. Instead, we see the exact opposite.

Facebook has over 600 employees and has raised over $400 million in capital (and is reportedly still looking for another big capital infusion). Digg has over 70 employees and has raised $40 million in capital. Twitter has somewhere around 25 employees and has raised $20 million in capital.

In other words, Facebook is a bloated company that spends money like it’s going out of style. Digg is a bloated company that is losing money on a marginal amount of revenue. Twitter is, relatively-speaking, the leanest of the bunch and ironically, the only company in this trio that could realistically implement a successful paid subscription model. Yet founder Biz Stone believes a business model could be a "distraction" at this stage of the game. Given Twitter’s recent security mishap, perhaps he’s right.

The reality is that while it’s true that open-source technologies and a large pool of development talent make building certain kinds of Internet "products" cheaper today, building a product and building a business around a product are two very different things.

Instead of following the lean-and-mean philosophy that Web 2.0 proponents promote, Web 2.0’s biggest stars have opted to put revenue models on the back burner. Instead, they’ve raised large amounts of capital at exorbitant valuations under the guise of supporting "growth" and achieving "critical mass." They figured that the revenue and profits would come eventually but clearly that was putting the cart before the horse.

This approach was fueled not only by the overabundance of easy venture capital money that needed to be invested and the promise of YouTube-sized acquisitions but by a stark truth: scaling services like Facebook and Twitter is not cheap.

Facebook’s $100 million debt financing for the sole purpose of leasing servers highlights very well the fact that offering free, advertising-supported services to millions upon millions of people is not a lean and- mean undertaking. The popularity of "open platforms", in which services need to allocate even greater resources to support applications that third-party developers have created, only exacerbates the situation.

In short, the model exhibited by the poster children of Web 2.0 does not reflect reality. Not only have the people who run Web 2.0’s most popular services largely bought into the model of VC bloat, the very nature of their services does not permit them to follow a lean-and-mean approach as traction is obtained.

The AdSense Economy

If you started an advertising-supported online content destination in the late 1990s, life was a lot tougher than it is today in many ways.

Back then, the nascent Internet advertising market was starting to grow rapidly and while there were huge opportunities for those entrepreneurs who were able to navigate it successfully, the market’s immaturity posed a lot of challenges.

That market is much easier to navigate today and Web 2.0 has been the beneficiary of what I like to call "The AdSense Economy." Thanks to AdSense, you can build an Internet product, launch it and "monetize" immediately by slapping up some ads courtesy of the friendly folks at Google.

In his article, "What is Web 2.0?", Tim O’Reilly lists AdSense as Web 2.0’s equivalent to Doubleclick.

And for good reason. AdSense (and programs like it) have been the initial primary source of revenue for many of the Web 2.0 "startups" that have launched (many of which you’ve never heard of, many of which you’ve already forgotten and many which have already disappeared into obscurity).

In theory, programs like AdSense give Web 2.0 upstarts a key advantage over their Web 1.0 counterparts: they permit low-effort monetization. If you launch a new service and manage to attract 10,000 visitors in the first month, you can monetize that traffic with almost no effort beyond adding a few lines of code to your website. Google, ad networks and other online ad companies do all the heavy lifting finding and dealing with advertisers.

Yet being able to monetize doesn’t mean being able to monetize effectively and profitably. The truth is that programs like AdSense are quite underwhelming and any service with real scale is not going to achieve anywhere near the same kinds of results with AdSense that it would with a dedicated ad sales staff (either internal or outsourced).

Sure, you’ve seen photos of AdSense webmasters holding up a $100,000+ check from Google and there are individuals and companies who make lots of money with AdSense. But they’re the exception, not the rule, and most of them are running services that are conducive to success (read: not "social media" services that tend to suffer from severe ad blindness).

But taking a step back, this isn’t about AdSense specifically. It’s about the mature online advertising market.

Many seemed to have believed the fact that this market was more mature than it was back in the late 1990s would be beneficial to Web 2.0 companies. After all, the online advertising market today is much more efficient and consists of a much bigger pie. Young Web 2.0 startups looking to tap into this should have an easier time, right?

Wrong. Market maturity is a double-edged sword because today’s mature online advertising market is:

More sophisticated. Ad buyers know a lot more about what they’re doing today than they did 10 years ago. This can make it more difficult for young startups to sell directly to brands and ad agencies because, even though a lot of money still gets thrown around and wasted, by in large, brands and ad agencies have a much better grasp of the digital space.

More competitive. Brands and ad agencies have a lot of options. In growing markets with lots of competition and few barriers to entry, a common characteristic is that the strong get stronger. Even though the online advertising pie is growing, major companies like Google and top properties and networks that register with comScore and Nielsen inevitably take a larger chunk of that pie because they represent the best avenue for efficient allocation of online ad spend in a cluttered online world.

Growing slower. Inevitably, nascent markets eventually mature and as they mature, growth slows. While the growth of online advertising (and the potential for future growth) is still quite significant, this market isn’t a plane that’s still sitting on the runway. What does this mean? It means that even if online advertising spend holds up relatively well during a deep recession, naturally slowing growth that’s inevitable in a maturing market could make the situation feel worse than the numbers might otherwise indicate.

Today’s economic downturn is far different (and far more severe) than the downturn in 2001 and that previous downturn, while painful for many, was actually not as problematic for the online advertising market as it should have been. The reason: the market was still so young and growing so much that the natural momentum it had for growth offset the macroeconomic climate. Today, a more mature online advertising market coupled with a more severe downturn will not be beneficial for Web 2.0 companies that are under the illusion that online advertising is recession-resistant.

All told, The AdSense Economy is not been as beneficial to the bottom line of Web 2.0 startups as many had argued it would be.

Conclusion

As we head into 2009 facing one of the toughest economic environments in decades knowing that the fun and games are over, it’s time to face the reality: the Web 2.0 we have today is not the Web 2.0 we envisioned a few short years ago.

The most popular Web 2.0 creations have not been cheap to grow and operate. They’re still struggling to find revenue models that will serve as the foundations of self-sustaining businesses and even those startups that generate significant revenue in absolute terms (namely Facebook) cannot justify the valuations they’ve been given. And profitability is still largely a pipe dream.

While it’s possible that Web 2.0 stars like Facebook, Digg and Twitter will turn things around, it’s quite clear that these companies are not like many of their hot Web 1.0 counterparts, which, despite having to battle challenges of their own, were able to develop viable revenue models and turn a profit relatively early on.

Given all this, for Web 2.0 proponents who continue to make the same asinine argument, "Don’t treat Web 2.0 like Web 1.0!", it’s 2009 and I concede defeat. Web 2.0 is not like Web 1.0. It’s in a special (ed) class of its own.

Yesterday on the Fox show, "The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet", expert Lesley Spencer Pyle explained how people at home could make money using the Internet. One of the ways Pyle noted was that you could become a Web designer and create brochure sites for businesses for at least $500 a piece. Pyle noted, "you would think you need some great skills to do that (web design), but there are tools to do it for you".

She named SnapPages as her tool of choice. We covered SnapPages (including a video interview with the founder) back in September. SnapPages seems like a well developed tool that might be good for creating your own website. The real issue here is that design is just one portion of creating an effective online presence. I hear stories from small businesses all the time who have left the online space because they felt that it wasn’t worth the investment. It’s these type of "fly by night" designers (or developers, marketers, etc.) that will slowly erode the industry as a whole and make it harder for talented professionals to get work.

Here’s the clip of Pyle explaining how to become a Web designer in 2 minutes or less:

(no comments about the video quality!)

Someone asked on Twitter: How many will be around at the end of 2009?

Check out other Sightix reviews on Alt Search Engines and Webware. Here’s Ari explaining how Sightix works when trying to find models like Bar Rafaeli:

There’s no Google, no Yahoo, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace. Friendster is there, but it’s Friendster Asia. There are a good number of hosting companies. As much as I love TripAdvisor, nothing they do is Web 2.0. Microsoft, Salesforce and IBM have large booths, Amazon has a tiny booth for AWS. There are several companies which seem to be looking for developers. I saw Present.ly, Mzing, Twing in the main expo hall which could be some of the only companies that could even be remotely considered Web 2.0.

There is a "long tail pavillion" which means $3k for a tiny, no space to move table. A variety of startups are in that area – if you make it over to the event, those tables are on the far right of the expo hall. Let’s not even talk about the lack of NY-based companies in the main expo hall.

I’ve attended over 100 events at the Javits Center over the last decade and the companies in the expo could have been from 1998, 2001 or now. As I spoke with over 50 people, most echoed my comments. Most of us assume that the cost for a booth much have been too high for startups to afford. But this is the first tech expo I’ve seen in a long time that had no Yahoo or Google presence.

Here are some of the photos and check out the full set on Flickr – the videos will be posted later today.