Web development can be… well… a pain sometimes. Especially if you are creating dynamic web pages with Javascript and CSS. Thankfully there are some tools out there to make your life easier. I’ll delve into a tool specific to Firefox called Firebug in this article.

Firebug is a Firefox plugin that can be installed by searching the Tools->Add-ons interface. After installing the plugin and restarting your browser as instructed, you’ll notice a little green icon (or bug) in the bottom right of your Firefox browser. Simply click on it to bring up Firebug and enable it.

I’ve been tinkering around with Canonical’s Ubuntu (Oo - boon - too) since the first release 4.10 “Warty Warthog” all the way up to their latest release 8.04 “Hardy Heron.” Since then I’ve flirted with other distributions, but I always end up back with Ubuntu for several reasons. The top three are as follows:

1. Nice package management and abundant repositories.

Having developed several CakePHP projects in Eclipse, I’ve always been on the lookout for things to make my life easier. Not too long ago I stumbled across an addition to Eclipse’s PHP Development Tools (PDT), which integrates the Zend/Xdebug debuggers into the Eclipse environment.

The guys over at CakePHP have whipped up something full of awesomeness for the PHP community. They have provided a tool to make our lives easier and more productive by removing the hassles of creating redundant boilerplate code using a framework to cleanly build web applications. I’ll briefly delve into what Cake is and why I think it is so awesome.

Ok, I’ll preface this article mentioning that having and managing more then one computer at a time is a not typical problem for most people.