Birnam Designs Blog -- sharing tips, resources, ideas, and more on web development and design

As most Firefox-savvy web developers know, nothing quite beats the Web Developer Toolbar (WDT) extension. As if you didn’t already have enough good reasons to develop in Firefox instead of IE, the WDT gives you so much control that after using it, development in IE feels like building a house of cards in the dark. Even Microsoft recognized the advantage that WDT gave Firefox over IE, and developed their own version, called Developer Toolbar (DevToolbar). Isn’t that a clever name? DevToolbar, currently in beta 2, shares many of the same features of WDT but lacks overall polish and really feels like a beta. And Microsoft doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to finish it, either. It’s been in beta for a long time.

Recently I was pointed towards DebugBar, an IE addon that is the closest I’ve seen to providing developers a real impetus for using IE for development again. It combines features from three of my favorite Firefox extensions: Web Developer Toolbar, Firebug, and ColorZilla, as well as a few others like ScreenGrab, Live HTTP Headers, cookie viewers, source code viewers, and a couple of bookmarklets I use frequently such as Javascript Shell and RenderMode. It’s quite the toolbox.

Read on for more about DebugBar »

(Currently, available only for users with Visual Rich Editor turned off)

v0.2

WordPress makes it easy to divide content into an introduction section and an extended content section by simply clicking on the “more” button. The introduction section is displayed in the main blog page, while the extended content is added to that section on the permalink page. This is great for those of us who have a tendency for writing lengthy posts. (ahem)

The only problem is that every post with extended content gets the same link, saying “Read the rest of this entry »” or (more…), depending on which version of Wordpress you’re using. Wouldn’t it be nice if you can customize what that says?

Now you can! CustomMore is a small plugin that asks for the text you want to use to link to the extended content. In the composition page of the WP admin, it looks like the same old “more” button (note: only available if the Visual Rich Editor is turned off), but when you click it, a box will pop up asking for the link text. It will appear in your document in modified form of the WordPress default more tag.

To install, just unzip the file into your wp-content/plugins/ directory. (You will be uploading the entire bd_custommore directory as a sub-directory of the plugins directory).

Download CustomMore v0.2 here.