A couple posts ago I wrote about the Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer which keeps your Firefox bookmarks in-sync across multiple machines. But what about all those blog posts, articles, and other pages you stumble across that you don’t want to clutter your bookmarks but you don’t want to lose either? That’s where the Delicious Bookmarks add-on comes into play.

Ever wonder why browsing a particular web site is slow? And maybe you’d like to know what the page load times are for that site. These questions can be answered quickly and easily with Yahoo’s YSlow add-on. YSlow gives you constant access to this type of information right within Firefox, and provides you some insight into possible reasons why a page is taking too long to load.

Like many of you out there, I have two machines I work on all the time: a desktop and a laptop. The desktop is my primary machine, while the laptop is relegated to travel and couch duty (I develop on the laptop from time-to-time, but not as much as I used to). One of the problems when splitting time between more than one machine is keeping things in sync across all of them, with one of those things being Firefox bookmarks. Fortunately the Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer add-on takes care of that problem.

The built-in download manager for Firefox isn’t bad. In fact, it’s pretty decent. It keeps your download history, allows you to re-download items, and gives you the direct download links if you need them. But awhile back Steven Harman told me about the Download Statusbar add-on and it’s now a staple in my add-on collection.

Obviously I use Firefox as my primary web browser, but occasionally I need to view a web site using IE. You know the sites that I’m talking about. The ones that look like complete ass or just don’t function properly unless viewed with IE. It’s unfortunate that we even have to worry about such things in today’s day and age, but that’s the reality we live in. And when that need arises, I almost never open IE itself; I use IE Tab instead.

Ever come come across a web site with a certain color in its design that you thought was really cool, and would like to know its RGB or HTML color code so you can steal it for your own use? Me too, and before ColorZilla came along I would always revert to inspecting a site’s CSS (using the Web Developer toolbar; more on that in a future post) to find the value, and while that worked, it’s not as easy as it could be. That’s where ColorZilla comes in.

Firefox introduced the world to the concept of tabbed browsing, and in doing so eliminated the need for people to run multiple instances of the same browser ever again. The only downside to the Firefox tabs is that when you have several tabs open they all tend to run together. Fortunately that little problem is solved with Colorful Tabs.

I was doing some stuff with ASP.NET MVC the other day (as a spike to implement REST) when I realized I wanted to setup two routes for the exact same URL where both routes would use the same controller, but invoke a different method on that controller based on the HTTP verb from the request. For example, if the request for http://mysite.com/api/users is with a GET, I want to invoke the List() method in the UsersController, but if the request is with a POST, I want to invoke the Create() method instead.

A few days ago I wrote about a new Graffiti theme that I created for my blog, named Rounded. Since then a few people have emailed me asking for the Rounded.xml file so that they could use it on their own Graffiti blog, and I’ve been more than happy to send it out. However, after a couple of requests I realized the theme wasn’t quite ready for prime-time sharing because it still had some Dave-specific items in there, notably the stuff to support using Disqus for comments.

In my last post I showed how we currently have 24 builds running at any given time, with more builds certainly to come in the future. With that many builds our build server can get pretty taxed at times and depending on what gets checked in and where, we might have 4-5 builds running at the same time. So not only is CruiseControl.NET constantly running, but so is MSBuild, BitDiffer, FxCop, PowerShell, Selenium, and Demeanor (and soon NUnit and NCover).

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few months getting all of our builds in proper working order, and even though we’ve been green across the board for awhile now, I never get tired of seeing this:

Ever since I moved my blog to Graffiti, I’ve been meaning to give it a shiny new cover. There are a number of nice-looking Graffiti themes out there (see here, here, and here), but none of them were quite what I was looking for. I ended up settling on a slightly customized version of the GreenWay theme and it served its purpose, but this past weekend I spent some time creating a new theme and think it turned out pretty well:

After much procrastination I finally ordered 8GB of memory for my desktop, which was dutifully delivered yesterday. If I could’ve gotten my headache to go away last night I would have installed the memory then, but it didn’t work out that way so I had to wait until this morning. But it was definitely worth the wait:

Last night Steve Harman and I went to the Kings of Leon concert here in Columbus and got our faces rocked off. The Kings of Leon put on a fantastic show and I highly recommend seeing them if they come your way. After the show I dropped Steve off at his place and got to thinking on my way home about all the bands I’ve seen and would like to see, which lead me to think “If I could put on a 1-day music festival in my backyard today, what would the lineup be?”.

Recently I was helping review some code for a bit of functionality being worked on in Community Server, and one of the items we discussed was how many method overloads should be provided for this particular piece of functionality. During that discussion I noticed a couple mistakes being made with the existing overloaded methods, and it got me thinking about API design from that perspective.