Spending all your income on Prozac? Stop the pain at it’s source! Install one or all of these Firefox extensions and I guarantee that your job, whatever it is, will become dramatically easier overnight. Preliminary tests have shown that Firebug’s strategy of pure, undiluted sexiness will instantaneously correct erectile dysfunction. Side-effects may include more free time to do what you actually want to be doing, including the possibility of discovering sunlight for those of you fortunate enough to not live in new england.

1. Firebug
• “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, an error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors.”
• I highly recommend choosing Firebug 1.0beta over the current 0.4.1 release. Try it, you’ll thank me! It’s one of the most incredibly useful pieces of software I ever ever had the luxury of using.
2. FireFTP
• “FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox”
• Perhaps not necessary if you’re more comfortable with another FTP client, but useful nonetheless for it’s small footprint and user interface. Absolutely my FTP client of choice. Once you get used to having your ftp sessions inside browser tabs no other way makes sense!
3. Greasemonkey
• “Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (”user scripts”) to any web page to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a web page’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a web page’s design or interaction.”
• Good for those little fixing up those annoying little quirks on websites that you’d otherwise have to put up with. Userscripts.org has a huge library of community-written scripts, so check there before being bothered to code your own fix. If it’s a reasonably popular site, chances are it’s already been done.
4. IE Tab
• “IE Tab, an extension from Taiwan, embeds Internet Explorer in a Mozilla/Firefox tab.”
• Constantly bouncing between IE and Firefox to get that CSS to match? Occasionally run into sites that require IE, but would rather keep your browsing confined to a Firefox window? Try it, you’ll like it.
• Probably windows only, depending on your perseverance I suppose.
5. Pearl Crescent Page Saver
• “Pearl Crescent Page Saver is an extension for Mozilla Firefox that lets you capture images of web pages.”
• So you think the PrtSc key is good enough, do you? Let’s see ya snap a page larger 10x the height of your screen then. Exactly. I use the free version and it works well, by the way.
6. SearchStatus
• “Designed for the highly specialized needs of search engine marketers, this toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar.”
• “For every site you visit using, SearchStatus lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN.”
7. StumbleUpon
• “Channel surf the internet with StumbleUpon! Discover great websites, videos, pictures and more — all according to your interests.”
• Submitting your best pages to StumbleUpon can result in an amazing traffic boost. In fact, StumbleUpon sends more traffic to Skin Deep than any other referring site. The best part is, assuming your content actually is valuable, stumblers will review it and give it the thumbs up, helping it continue to spread.
• I’ve also had great success in the past with their paid advertising program.
8. Tab Mix Plus
• “Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager with crash recovery that can save and restore combinations of opened tabs and windows.”
• Mentioned before on Skin Deep. I find this one useful mostly for it’s session management features.
• My configuration file, to get you started.
9. TextMarker!
• “Allows you to highlight text selections”
• This one isn’t really essential, but it is helpful for long pages of text, especially those that you intend to print out. It could be a thousand times more useful if your highlight data was saved until the next time you come back to the page.
10. Web Developer
• “The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools.”
• The description is vague because this extension really is beyond description. The Web Developer Toolbar has more features than any other extension I’ve ever seen. I really can’t imagine life without it.
• Some of Firebug’s features are duplicated but they coexist quite happily together and I recommend installing both.
11. DOM Inspector
• “DOM Inspector is a tool that can be used to inspect and edit the live DOM of any web document or XUL application. The DOM hierarchy can be navigated using a two-paned window that allows for a variety of different views on the document and all nodes within.”
• You should already have this, though some distribution-specific Firefox builds strip it out. This is dumb. It comes with Firefox for a reason, use it!
12. ColorZilla
• “Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies.”
• If you already have the Web Developer toolbar, you don’t need this, but I think it’s handy.
  
13. del.icio.us
• “del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.”
• Really simplifies bookmarking with del.icio.us. I haven’t even used my browser’s bookmarks in over a year. I’ve even considered hacking the chrome to remove the useless bookmarks menu. I’ll get around to it someday.
14. Adblock
• “Adblock allows the user to specify filters, which remove unwanted content based on the source-address.“
• Makes the web much more pleasant. Just don’t forget to whitelist your own sites so you can see them the way your visitors will!
• Best in conjunction with Filterset.G and Adblock Filterset.G Updater.
15. Operator
• “Operator lets you combine pieces of information on Web sites with applications in ways that are useful. For instance, Flickr + Google Maps, Upcoming.org + Google Calendar, Yahoo! Local + your address book, and many more possibilities and permutations. All of these scenarios are possible due to Microformats, an emerging standard for injecting semantics into HTML.”
• I haven’t had much occasion to use this one yet, but I’m sure I will in the near future. Consider optional.

Now, go install all of these and enjoy your new life. Am I forgetting anything important?

I’m not a morning person. Climbing out of bed is like ascending Everest with my hands tied behind my back. Getting out of the shower is the most difficult part of my day (what I would do without heated running water, I dare not even think). Even worse is the fact that once my body has reached my desk, my mind can take hours to catch up. I’m experiencing this disparity right now, as I type; but to a much lesser degree than some particularly horrible mornings last week.

Why the difference? Breakfast.

I’ll clarify. For me, it has very little to do with eating breakfast and everything to do with cooking breakfast. I’m a pretty busy guy; a lot of the time breakfast means toaster waffles or a bowl of granola and milk. But more and more, I’m finding that taking time in the morning to create a multi-part meal will jolt my mind out of it’s morning sluggishness - regardless of whether I even eat it afterwards.

Maybe it’s act of juggling different tasks in the kitchen (trying not to burn the eggs while I sauté peppers and mushrooms, and have it all done before the coffee is cold), or perhaps simply choosing what to make and how is warming up whatever region of the nervous system is responsible for decision-making… who knows. It doesn’t matter why.

Speculation aside, it’s the first creative act of the day. As a designer striving to be creative throughout the entire day, I feel somehow that this is sacred, and not to be skipped over in favor of a longer but less-enjoyed workday.

How do you deal with mornings? Your comments are appreciated.

I intended to take a photo to accompany this post, but I ate the subject. Sorry ;)