On May 15, 2007, at 8:13 AM, Jean Gazis wrote:

I installed firebug and the web dev stuff in firefox, but I don't know what to do with them, they don't seem to show what I want to know, or I can't figure out what it is showing me. (I also suspect firebug slows my firefox down drastically, but that might be totally unrelated.)

If you click on the "inspect" tab, Firebug will show you all sorts of stuff, including what relevant CSS tags in what CSS files are affecting a given element. It's great for figuring out what's going on in a page you're trying to learn from or trying to debug.

A couple of other text editing apps I've used are TextWrangler (and BBEdit, which is a $ version with more features) and TextMate.

Also very very helpful is MAMP -- a ridiculously easy way to set up a local Drupal install so you can do all your work on your computer, making page refreshes almost instantaneous.

Laura