The website of Sam Devol – Running With Scissors – is fast becoming a great repository of information for newcomers to WordPress with an abundance of step by step advice, troubleshooting tips and links to other sites that deal with specific issues. Sam is a regular on the WP support forum and has helped me out a few times in the past, including one or two fixes for some sloppy code, and he knows his stuff. It’s just a shame that so much of this useful material has to be hunted down outside of the official WordPress Codex.

Anyway, I have Sam to thank for another discovery. FireBug from Joe Hewitt. Yes I’m sure everyone knows about FireBug except me but I am bad at browsing so much of this stuff just passes me by. FireFox is not my browser of choice. But it is the browser I use just about all of the time. And that is largely because of the wonderful extensions that are available. As far as help with web development is concerned, I figured that the absolutely indispensable Web Developer Extension from Chris Pederick was the extension king. FireBug builds on that with even more fantastic help. As the author says: “FireBug lets you explore the far corners of the DOM by keyboard or mouse. All of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including a debugger, error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors.”

FireFox is not my browser of choice but it is more and more becoming the only browser possible for me to use.