We are happy to announce the availability of a new product, Clue Tracker for the iPhone and iPod touch. Clue Tracker is a location-aware mobile app that makes it easy to find and use letterbox clues. Learn more on the Clue Tracker product page.

What is a letterbox? A letterbox is the “treasure” part of a treasure hunting hobby called letterboxing. Letterboxes are hidden all over the world. Clues to finding letterboxes can be found on web sites such as http://letterboxing.org and http://atlasquest.com. Each letterbox contains a logbook for people who find the box to record their nickname and date, plus a rubber stamp which they can use to make an imprint in their personal letterbox journal.

We love to receive feedback and suggestions so please send them to us.

Occasionally we receive email from someone who wants to remove or change the position of the Page Saver toolbar icon (for example, moving it to a different location on the navigation toolbar or moving it to another Firefox toolbar). It is not obvious to many people how to do this, so I thought I would write a short article that explains how to customize your Firefox toolbars.

From the View | Toolbars submenu, choose “Customize…” A toolbar customization dialog that shows all of the items you can add to one of the toolbars will be opened below the Firefox toolbars. With Firefox 3 on Mac I see a dialog that looks like this:

At this point, you can drag items out of the dialog to any location on a toolbar or you can drag items that are already on a toolbar to a different location or to another toolbar. To remove an item from a toolbar, simply drag it into the dialog. When you are finished, click the Done button.

That’s all there is to it! The only caveat is that some toolbars cannot be customized (but most can).

Some of the customizations I like to make are to add separators and spacers and to remove the Firefox search box (I define keywords so I can search directly from the location bar).

You can also read the official Mozilla documentation on toolbar customization.

We are pleased to announce a new product. Pearl Crescent Do Not Disturb is a Firefox add-on that suppresses prompts that interfere with unattended use of the browser. Many people use Firefox in a scripted or server environment where no one is available to dismiss annoying prompts that cause Firefox to pause and wait for input. For example, JavaScript code running on a web page can use window.alert() or window.prompt() to display modal windows. Do Not Disturb suppresses or automatically dismisses these kind of popup windows and prompts so that Firefox just keeps on going.

Do Not Disturb is very effective, and it is also simple to install and use. The various suppression behaviors may be controlled by changing settings on the Do Not Disturb options window.

Learn more by visiting the Do Not Disturb product page or dive in and read the manual.

Last October, we updated Page Saver to be compatible with the early releases of Firefox 3. However, we expected that we would need to make additional changes to Page Saver since new features were still being added to Firefox at that time.

Here at Pearl Crescent, we are proud to announce version 1.7.1 of Page Saver (both Basic and Pro editions). For this release we added a Greek translation (thank you Demetris Kikizas) and made some minor adjustments and fixes for Firefox 3. In addition, Page Saver Pro now allows file name patterns to be used with the -saveas command line option.

As always, if you have any questions, comments or compliments to share with us, feel free to leave a reply below or use our feedback form.

Keyword Box is a free (no cost) extension for Mozilla Firefox that adds a toolbar item which invokes a script or URL with the text you enter. The script can be customized to your needs or you can use one of the sample scripts provided by the extension. Keyword Box includes the following sample scripts:

* Web Dev Lookup
Look up CSS properties, HTML tags, JavaScript functions or PHP functions (useful for web developers).

* Highlight Text
Highlight (and a yellow background) to each occurrence of a word or phrase on the currently loaded web page.

* Go to Mozilla Bug
View Mozilla bug reports including those for Firefox and Thunderbird.

* Weather
Get weather information for U.S. locations (useful for people who travel often.)

* Map
Show information from Google Maps.

The screenshot below shows Keyword Box in action. In this case, Keyword Box was configured with the Map sample script, so entering “mountain view, ca” in the keyword box and pressing enter caused a Google Maps page to load.

Why Use Keyword Box?
Keyword Box provides capabilities similar to bookmark keywords in Firefox. We created Keyword Box because some people prefer to have a specific text entry field that makes the availability of a shortcut more prominent.

Originally, this extension was requested by one of our clients. But we think many people will find a use for it. So try Keyword Box and then let us know what you think.

Earlier this week, we launched a new product named Page Saver Toolkit that allows web and Mozilla developers to use the page capture capabilities of Page Saver Pro. By placing a little bit of JavaScript code inside a web page, you can call the Page Saver Pro engine to save an image of a page to a local PNG file. Or save it to a local JPEG file. Or upload it to an FTP server. Or save the area occupied by a single DOM element on the page. In fact, the Toolkit API will let you access nearly all of the capabilities of Page Saver Pro.

We also provide an XPCOM interface which is callable from privileged code inside Firefox (typically, that means from within another extension).

I could go on and on but I know this kind of product is not for everyone. But for those of you who are doing things like writing automated quality assurance tests for an interactive web product or who want to go beyond the capabilities provided by Page Saver Pro’s command line interface, the Toolkit is the product for you. Plus, it is fun to use. Learn more on these pages:

• Page Saver Toolkit Overview.
• Documentation (includes sample code).

Please take a look and let us know what you think.

In working on the new blog design, I’d like to display some thumbnail pictures of various websites I frequent. There’s probably a dozen or so of these and they update their content frequently, so I’d like to change my thumbnails accordingly – maybe not in real time, but certainly weekly or maybe even daily. I started looking around on the web for a solution, and there just didn’t seem to be one in my grasp – either hardware platform or cost-wise.
…
I was already using Page Saver, a Firefox extension from the local web folks at Pearl Crescent. It’s a great tool for taking screen shots – you literally just click and you’re done. It has a bunch of options, including whether to save as jpg or png. I thought for a moment that I might just do that manually every day, but quickly thought better of it. However, if you pony up $15 for the Pro version, first off, you can save the thumbnails directly to an FTP server, and second, you can run it from the command line, which means you can automate the captures. Awesome! (Furthermore, you can specify an ElementID within a page if you only want that one part – double awesome!)

If you read her entire posting you will learn that you cannot save to an FTP server from the command line (maybe we should fix that, although there are many tools to automate that kind of thing). Many of our customers use Page Saver Pro from the command line, which is a great testimony to the flexibility of Firefox and to people’s creativity in finding useful ways to use small tools such as Page Saver.

And mitten — thanks for the great posting on Page Saver. Feel free to use the “Send Feedback…” option in the Page Saver menu to send us feature requests. We try to implement the most requested features.

If you have an Intel-based Mac you’ll want to get the Firefox update as soon as possible (actually, everyone should upgrade in order to obtain important security fixes). The easiest way is to choose “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu but you can also download 1.5.0.5 from here.

Related links:

• The Pearl Crescent Page Server home page.
• Rendering Web Page to Images (Robert O’Callahan)
• Review of Firefox 1.5 (CNET)

Andy King from Web Site Optimization has a neat online tool called the Web Page Analyzer that looks at a live site and provides advice to help you reduce page load time and increase usability. Definitely recommended. Andy also is the author of the book Speed Up Your Site.

We always check our pages by running them through the W3C’s Markup Validation Service (works for HTML, XHTML, CSS, and probably more document types). For Atom and RSS feeds, try FEED Validator. Another great informative site is The Web Standards Project. Thankfully most end users have left the older “4.x” browsers behind and are using modern browsers that provide good support for web standards.

Which brings us to CSS (cascading style sheets). Like most people today, we use CSS extensively for page layout, rollover effects, and so on. We often go to the W3C CSS standards site (the horses mouth, so to speak). Eric Meyer is a CSS guru who has an informative site (he is also the author of the books Eric Meyer on CSS and More Eric Meyer on CSS). And when we need inspiration we click on some of the appealing designs over at the css Zen Garden.

CSS-centric sites tend to be treated well by the search engines too. Search engine marketing is a huge, evolving area that is very important for a lot of web sites. Some of the resources we like are SEO Today and Search Engine Watch. One of the leading search engine marketing companies, Oneupweb, also has a lot of good information on their site.

What resources do you rely on to help you create or improve web sites?