Today’s Readings

I recently tripped across the Firefox Tips & Tricks page.  There probably isn’t a lot here that most developers don’t already know, but being someone that is always on the look-out for new keyboard shortcuts, I found these, a couple of which are new to me and I expect will be quite useful:

  • Zoom in: Ctrl++
  • Zoom out: Ctrl+-
  • Zoom back to normal: Ctrl+0 (that’s a zero)
  • Open a new tab: Ctrl+T
  • Close current tab: Ctrl+W
  • Re-open a closed tab: Shift+Ctrl+T (and you can keep hitting it to run back through all the tabs you’ve closed in the current session)
  • Open a new Firefox browser: Ctrl+N
  • Close Firefox: Shift+Ctrl+W (one I wish I could delete, because I accidentally hit this all the time…)
  • Jump to Location bar: Ctrl+L
  • Jump to Search: Ctrl+K
  • Jump from tab-to-tab: Ctrl+Tab / Shift+Ctrl+Tab
  • Scroll down / up page: Spacebar / Shift+Spacebar
  • Back / Forward: Alt+ / Alt+
  • Refresh current page: Ctrl+R

All you geeks out there, pay attention!  The Holy Grail of Geekdom, Popular Science, has scanned their entire archive and is offering it for free online!

You know, some day this “Internet Explorer” thing just might take off!  Apparently IE9 will bring with it a healthy dose of HTML5, and it will give vastly improved JS processing, CSS3 availability, and font rendering!

Ever get into an argument about who said what is some movie?  Well, there a couple new services are out to help settle your battles…

Nicholas Gallagher has some really cool demos of speech bubbles using nothing but CSS.

A fairly recent SitePoint newsletter took a pretty in-depth look at , including pricing options, how it all works,and a few font foundry alternatives.  It would be really great to see some large firms start diving into @font-face, but I have to say, my biggest concern about using a font service like this would be “what if their server goes down?”…  I mean, if I host my own fonts, at least if my server goes down, the entire site is down; with a font service, now I have to worry about two servers…

And another SitePoint article, this time about , really piqued my interest…  and made me wish I had an iPhone to test it out on…

So, how many of you test your sites across various browsers, and maybe even OSs, before launching?  Right, we all do.  But how many of you test your font stacks?  That’s a lot of hands that just went down…  Well, if you don’t feel like deleting fonts from your CSS and refreshing, maybe you’ll enjoy trying leeky‘s , a JS tester that scans your page elements, compiles a list of all unique fonts, and offers that list, along with the ability to “Remove” each font, so you can see what your page would look like without it.  The script is so small that I was able to run it from my Firebug console; here is a screen capture of the script in action on my lab site (notice the small gray banner and buttons across the top of the page):
Font Stack Tester screen capture
As leeky states, it isn’t completely ready for prime-time just yet (for example, I cannot “Remove” the primary font in either of my font stacks, I suspect because both of them use quotes in the CSS declaration, such as ‘Courier New’), but it is pretty cool nonetheless!

Wow, the Social Media Network Icon Pack from is pretty darned handy!

And finally, a re-post from Cameron Moll, for all you designy-types out there…

Happy reading,
Atg

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