The official Webby Awards were announced.  For those of those not familiar, it’s like the Oscars for web development.  There’s some big names and some small names in there as well.  Some of the companies I worked for this year have been honored by the organization.

If you want to see some excellent websites or are looking to build something new and are looking for inspiration, this is a good place to start.  Why not review the best of the best?

http://www.webbyawards.com/

While I like to keep the software installs on my machines pretty vanilla, if there is a tool that helps my productivity I’m all for checking it out.  While I’ve moved primarily to WebKit for web development, I often find myself using Firefox as well.  I keep my Firefox install to the base plus three extensions.

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. Firebug tends to be used the most by us. I can easily inspect the DOM and edit CSS inline. Those are key features for us. Also it immediately tells any JavaScript errors in the code. Another nice feature is you can print things out in the console. This helps quite a bit in debugging.
Web Developer Toolbar

Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. Sometimes Firebug isn’t able to inspect the DOM so being able to view the generated source is nice. Also you are able to disable certain aspects of the page such as JavaScript or CSS or outline certain elements as well. It has a built in validator for checking your code.
YSlow

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on Yahoo’s rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a nice extension to Firebug. Yahoo did a nice job of collecting some tips for improving the speed of a website. While in some sites, I can’t always get an A rating I try to make sure if there is anything I can do, that I at least make an attempt to do it.
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We’ve been using the YUI CSS framework for a lot of our recent work including this site as well.  The YUI CSS framework is broken down by Yahoo in four different sections Reset, Base, Fonts, and Grids.  The four sections are available in a number of different formats as either files for each section or a single file with minified versions as well.  For final production we use the minified version that includes Reset, Fonts, and Grids and it’s been recommended to use this file because it’s in it’s smallest possible form and it is available through a permalink from Yahoo.

I had looked at Google blueprintcss for a while as well as YUI CSS and both had it’s pros and cons, but continued to use my own base files that I had been used to working with for quite a long time.  So what actually switched me over to YUI CSS?  I’ve been contracting through SolutionSet for a couple of years now and Nate Koechley from Yahoo came in gave a presentation about YUI CSS and just YUI in general.  It got me thinking that this was a good idea, but was it going to replace my everyday use case files.  It wasn’t convinced until I watched Nate’s video in YUI Theater.

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If you have ever been interested about the inner workings of JavaScript and haven’t already, you should take a look at several video lectures by Douglas Crockford. Douglas Crockford is a Senior JavaScript Architect at Yahoo! and has authored an O’Reilly Book: “JavaScript: The Good Parts“. The two I’d recommend starting off with are “The JavaScript Programming Language” that provides fundamental yet thorough information into the JS language such as objects and functions. Even if you have been using JS for an extended period of time, I’d recommend browsing through the lecture. The second video lecture is basically a continuation from the first, “Advanced JavaScript“.

These lectures do not delve into any of the current JS Libraries like YUI, mootools, or prototoype, but the lectures will help you extend those libraries as needed by project demands. The general Yahoo! UI (YUI) Library Theater page has many other video lectures available that get into utilizing the YUI JS library.