There are thousands of thousands of Firefox add-ons.  Everyone has their own personal favorites.  But I am sure some of them are everyone’s favorite.

I am trying to compile a list of the best of the Firfox add-ons which are useful to specific purpose and can make life bit easy

I would like to request all the visitors and readers to help me compile this list by suggesting their own favorites and what they find good about it.  I will keep updating this list based on your feedback and after I try it.

Below is the list of Firefox add-ons I liked. I have categorized the list as per my convenience and based on purpose.

Toolbars

1. Web Developer: The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. This toolbar makes a Web developer life easy. This toolbar has tool related to Cookies, CSS, Forms, Images etc.. It also have tool to validate web page again different web standards like W3C, section 508 etc.

2. Google Toolbar: Almost everbody knows about this toolbar. This provide many features related to google like bookmark, gmail access, page rank, auto fill etc.

   

Blogging and Review Tool

1. ScribeFire: ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, upload images, and post to multiple blogs.
2. FireShot: FireShot is a Firefox extension that creates screenshots of web pages.
   Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify web captures and insert text annotations and graphical annotations. Such functionality will be especially useful for web designers, testers and content reviewers.
   It’s possible to choose whether you want to capture entire web page or take screenshot of only visible part of the web page.

   The captures can be:

   – uploaded to FREE public screenshot hosting
   – saved to disk (PNG, GIF, JPEG, BMP)
   – printed
   – copied to clipboard
   – e-mailed

   – sent to configurable external editor for further processing.

   

 Web Development

1. Firebug: Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. A must for web developers.
2. YSlow: YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on Yahoo’s rules for high performance web sites. YSlow has dependecy on Firebug.

Themes and Customizations

1. Cooliris: Full-Screen, 3D — Cooliris transforms your browser into a visually stunning experience for searching, viewing, and sharing online photos and videos. Our "3D Wall" lets you effortlessly search and zoom your way around thousands of images, videos, movies, news feeds, and even online retailers. To share stuff with friends, just drag and drop

Bookmarks

1. Read It Later: Read It Later allows you to save pages of interest to read later. It eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest. It Includes following features
   i) Save pages to a reading list to read when you have time
   ii) Offline Reading Mode – Read the items you’ve saved for later on the plane, train, or anywhere
   iii) Access Anywhere – Manage your list in any browser, on any device
   iv) RSS Feeds – View your list from anywhere with automatic rss feeds of your items
   v) Sync Between Computers – Sync your reading list with any number of computers, work or home
   vi) After reading, bookmark pages on your preferred bookmarking service
   vii) Click to Save Mode – Quickly batch a reading list just by clicking on interesting links

Others

1. Google Redesigned: Google Redesigned is a Mozilla Firefox extension designed by Globex Designs that aims to fully redesign the look and feel of popular Google services. This is achieved with Cascading StyleSheet (CSS) files which are loaded on the client’s browser. The extension simplifies the use of these styles by providing auto-updates, easy management and notifications of changes. You can also download and use the styles individually by going to their respective pages.

   
    

2. Flashblock: Flashblock is an extension for the Mozilla, Firefox, and Netscape browsers that takes a pessimistic approach to dealing with Macromedia Flash content on a webpage and blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves placeholders on the webpage that allow you to click to download and then view the Flash content. This enhance the speed fo FF by blocking the Flash and FF consume less memory.

Disclaimer:  The description of the add-ons has been taken from their respective add-on pages.  I have added some comments to it though.  Any error in description or features mentioned but not available is the responsibility of respective add-on providers.  The description provided here is just for information only. I do not take any responsibility for the use of these add-ons.  Some add-ons might not work on all platform.  The exact features can be found on these add-on pages on Mozilla.  (Some images are taken from Mozilla Add-ons pages/developers pages.)

Let’s celebrate the auspicious day of Diwali with fun and frolic. May this bright day bring Bountiful Bliss and Joy in your life [for more information click here].

Some time we have to collect last 7 or 15 days or X days (or month, year or week) data from MySQL table. For example let us find out who are the members logined in our forum in last week. One site may be interested in knowing new new users registered for newsletter. Here irrespective of the date values we want the records of last X days from today, or we can say that the records between today and last X days ( month , year or week) are required.

We will use the MySQL function CURDATE() to get the today’s date.

To get the difference in today date and previous day or month we have to use the MySQL function DATE_SUB

DATE_SUB is a MySQL function which takes date expression, the interval and the constant to return the date value for further calculation.

Here are some sample queries on how to get the records as per requirements . 

select * from tbl_members where `created_on` >= DATE_SUB(CURDATE(), INTERVAL 15 DAY)

The above query will return last 15 days records. Note that this query will return all future dates also. To exclude future dates we have to modify the above command a little by using between query to get records. Here is the modified one.

SELECT * FROM tbl_members WHERE `created_on` BETWEEN DATE_SUB( CURDATE( ) ,INTERVAL 15 DAY ) AND CURDATE( )

Let us try to get records added in last one month

select * from tbl_members where `created_on` >= DATE_SUB(CURDATE(), INTERVAL 1 MONTH)

Here also future records will be returned so we can take care of that by using BETWEEN commands if required.

select * from tbl_members where `created_on` >= DATE_SUB(CURDATE(), INTERVAL 1 YEAR)

You can easily make out what the above query will return.

We can collect records between a particular date ranges by using between command and DATE_SUB. Here are some queries to generate records between two date ranges.

select * from tbl_members where `created_on` BETWEEN DATE_SUB( CURDATE( ) ,INTERVAL 3 MONTH ) AND DATE_SUB( CURDATE( ) ,INTERVAL 0 MONTH )

This query will return records between last three months. This query again we will modify to get the records between three moths and six months.

select * from tbl_members where `created_on` BETWEEN DATE_SUB( CURDATE( ) ,INTERVAL 6 MONTH ) AND DATE_SUB( CURDATE( ) ,INTERVAL 3 MONTH )

Now let us change this to get records between 6 month and 12 month.

select * from tbl_members where `created_on` BETWEEN DATE_SUB( CURDATE( ) ,INTERVAL 12 MONTH ) AND DATE_SUB( CURDATE( ) ,INTERVAL 6 MONTH )

With this you can understand how the records between a month range or a year range can be collected from a table. Note that the months ranges are calculated starting from current day. So if we are collecting records of last three months and we are in 20th day of 1st month then records of 20th day of 1st month we will get but the records of 19th day of 1st month will be returning on next query that is between 3 months and 6 months.

Now let us try a different requirement. How to get the records of the working days of the week so far ? If today is Thursday then records from Monday to Thursday should be returned. We will discuss this in our next section >>.

Here is the sql code to create and fill the table with records

CREATE TABLE tbl_members (
    `id` int(2) NOT NULL auto_increment,
    `user_name` varchar(50) NOT NULL ,
    `created_on` datetime NOT NULL default ’0000-00-00 00:00:00′,
   
    UNIQUE KEY `id` (`id`)
    ) ENGINE=MyISAM AUTO_INCREMENT=1 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=11 ;

INSERT INTO tbl_members VALUES (1, ‘example1@example.com’, ’2008-03-20 00:00:00′);
INSERT INTO tbl_members VALUES (2, ‘example2@example.com’, ’2008-04-16 23:40:30′);
INSERT INTO tbl_members VALUES (3, ‘example3@example.com’, ’2007-11-08 15:02:15′);
INSERT INTO tbl_members VALUES (4, ‘example4@example.com’, ’2006-05-10 10:10:10′);
INSERT INTO tbl_members VALUES (5, ‘example5@example.com’,  ’2006-05-10 10:10:10′);
INSERT INTO tbl_members VALUES (6, ‘example6@example.com’,  ’2006-05-10 10:10:10′);
 

PHP is a computer scripting language. Originally designed for producing dynamic web pages, it has evolved to include a command line interface capability and can be used in standalone graphical applications.

While PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, the main implementation of PHP is now produced by The PHP Group and serves as the de facto standard for PHP as there is no formal specification. Released under the PHP License, the Free Software Foundation considers it to be free software.

PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. It generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating web pages as output. It can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. PHP is installed on more than 20 million websites and 1 million web servers.[6] The most recent major release of PHP was version 5.2.6 on May 1, 2008.