Firefox is more than a browser. It’s a toolbox, just waiting to be filled with tools.

In this Pimp Your Firefox series of posts I’ll be sharing 12 truly useful Firefox extensions to suit different breeds of freelancers.

I’ve capped the number at 12 to ensure only the highest quality extensions make the cut. This is for freelancers who want only the best tools to make their working day easier and more productive.

Today’s post highlights 15 web applications that are fun and very useful. Some of them are extremely useful where as others allow you to have a good ol’ time.

This article lists a ton of links to blog collections and showcase sites. If you're having a difficult time coming up with a design for your blog, this is a great place to start!

Net neutrality activists apparently have information confirming that all major ISPs are conspiring to make the Internet a subscription-based service by 2012.

I don't know if I buy into this, or if the ISPs could even pull it off, but it's interesting nonetheless.

WYSIWYG-editors are often criticized by real coding ninjas for bloated, dirty and not standards-complaint source code they’ve been producing over the last years. However, WYSIWYG-editors have become much better recently. Some of them even produce valid and elegant code.

Looking for an RSS icon for your blog? Look no further than this massive collection of the coolest icons.

StylizedWeb shares with you a list of 30 of the best Firefox add-ons, very useful for web designers and developers.

Newspapers just don't "get" the Web. Valleywag comments on 5 ways they've screwed it up.

If you’re interested in analyzing and optimizing your page layout - here’s some extremely useful tools that you can use to help.

Survey of popular blogs reveals interesting information and findings regarding navigation placement, use of footers and sidebars and more. If you're a blogger, this is an interesting read.

WebClip Icons are strictly for iPhone & iPod Touch users, but since they are quite the popular little devices, website owners might want to think about adding a WebClip icon soon. A WebClip icon is the icon that the iPhone/iPod Touch uses if a user adds your site to their (now customizable) homescreen. Learn how to create your WebClip Icon here.

WriteMaps is a free web-based tool that allows you to create, edit, and share sitemaps online. As a WriteMaps user, you and your team will be able to build and access your sitemaps from anywhere, without having to rely on proprietary desktop apps and static files. To get started, take the tour or sign-up for an account!

With Sprout, you can build, publish and manage widgets, mini-sites, banners, mashups and other rich media Web content in three easy steps.

Sprouts can be of any size and any number of pages and can include images, video and audio and components such as slideshows and jukeboxes as well as Web service components such as Twitter, PollDaddy, ChipIn and more.

Where to come for practical business advice. Maybe you’ve already made a range of expensive mistakes. Maybe you are trying to avoid the possibilities. No prob, your-mistakes-are-us.

BoDo is grass-roots-get-down-and-dirty-love-yo-mamma. We’ll talk about serious subjects such as “When to bring in a PITA clause,” “How to keep your clients” and “How to fire a client.” As well as lighter fare like “Working in your undies” and “How to tell when your down time is up.”

A great design community featuring commentary and tutorials

Have you ever wanted to edit the web pages of another website? This simple line of code makes it possible.

Of course you can’t actually edit the actual web page but you can edit the page as you see it on your screen.

This is one of the ways scammers create fake screenshots, fake Adsense & affiliate earnings and even fake Paypal transactions.

A huge list of design-related blogs which ping BlogFlux.

A huge list of design-related RSS feeds, complete with links to the sites. I check this one often!

Digg.com has released it's initial Firefox toolbar. The Firefox 3 toolbar allows you to submit, Digg, and view the Digg count for any site you surf to.

An analysis of common mistakes in the portfolios of Web designers. This article will help you learn from the mistakes of many other designers out there.

Expand short URLs on any webpage with the LongURL Mobile Expander Firefox extension or Greasemonkey script.

Supported services: tinyurl.com, is.gd, ping.fm, ur1.ca, bit.ly, snipurl.com, tweetburner.com, metamark.net, url.ie, x.se, 6url.com, yep.it, piurl.com, and more!

Mozilla has announced the official release of Firefox 3 beta 2, the tenth major developer milestone in the Firefox 3 development timeline. The new beta, which is available for download from Mozilla's web site, includes interface improvements and a lot of extra polish.

ArsTech has the scoop.

PDF Hammer is a website that allows you to edit your PDF files online for free. You don't need to install any additional software, you can edit PDF documents right now inside your browser.

The one thing that I LOVE about Firefox, what drove me to use it instead of Safari, are add-on extensions. There's an extension for everything. Google recently announced that they're working on the ability to have add-ons in their recently released Web browser, Chrome.

In the beginning, there was not light on the web. It was awfully crowded with dancing marquees, tedious frames, unbearable midis and annoying spinning @’s. It was the dark ages of the web. Then refreshing empty spaces, vibrant, high contrast colors, lovely gradients, big text, original gloss shine effect, diagonal lines and of course reflected logos came on our rescue. Everything was shiny and with that great brandnu smell. The Web 2.0 look was born.

But guess what? There are some people getting tired of that.

Find out what you can do with your design skills, long after the design business has left you behind.

It has nothing to do with fonts, but everything to do with fun. It's almost addictive.

Check out Mono's Faces New Year page and download the Faces screensaver.

Update: It appears to only run on Tiger or lower.

Korean computer engineers are introducing a new digital music format that has separate controls on the sound volume for each musical instrument, such as guitar, drum, base and voice -- an ideal tool for music lovers of different tastes as well as karaoke fans.

The new format, which has a file extension format of MT9 and a commercial title of Music 2.0, is poised to replace the popular MP3 file format as the de facto standard of the digital music source, its inventors say.

NBC dumped Microsoft Silverlight for NFL game streaming in favor of Adobe Flash. The results after the first game of 2008 this past Thursday night was a disaster. Choppy, unwatchable video was all users got.

I love Adobe, but I think this was a huge mistake. I watched a few Olympic events on NBC.com and was completely taken by surprise at how great Microsoft Silverlight worked out. I had to download the plugin, which took just a few seconds, and install first, but it was no problem at all. The video quality was superb, and I never experienced choppy, unwatchable video. Not once.

Flash, on the other hand, virtually guarantees studdering, grainy, generally poor quality video. At least in streaming content.

I realize that it really comes down to the quality of the encoding work, but I can't help but to think that the technology used in Silverlight is just better.

This tool will easily allow you to create RSS buttons or "chicklets" for your blog.

Newsgator's recent announcement that their popular line of cross-platform newsreaders were now free had many of you asking why you would ever give up the web-based bliss of Google Reader for desktop-based readers; still others were wondering why anyone wouldn't ride the desktop wave now that these best-in-class readers have hit the free market. Today we're comparing the most popular web-based newsreader, Google Reader, with the freeware, desktop-based readers from Newsgator. If you think you're running the perfect reader for your needs, take another look—you might be surprised at what you're missing.

Sears.com is distributing spyware that tracks all your Internet usage - including banking logins, email, and all other forms of Internet usage - all in the name of "community participation."

Every website visitor that joins the Sears community installs software that acts as a proxy to every web transaction made on the compromised computer. In other words, if you have installed Sears software ("the proxy") on your system, all data transmitted to and from your system will be intercepted.

Send an email to yourself with a delivery date of February 23, 2037, or any other date in the future. No guarantee it'll arrive, but fun nonetheless.

Web 2.0 as a style is not dead, far from it. Styles don't die. If anything they percolate and then fuse into other styles. They get absorbed by the forward movement of design trends. Web 2.0 styles are mixed with grunge designs in many websites and graphics today. This style is Gradient Grunge. Let's take a look at some of the characteristics that make up this growing design trend today.

The Graphic Style of Everybody Else, a site dedicated soley to great print design work, and the designers who created it.

Eric Karjaluoto over at Ideas on Ideas has authored a thought-invoking article titled "The web, community, privacy and optimism." Eric's stuff is always worth the read.

CSS can powerfully open the doors to a lot of rich and unique techniques. Today we are presenting a round-up of CSS coding, creative approaches and techniques. Definitely worth taking a very close look at! We also included some basic techniques you can probably use in every project you are developing.

Verisign has acquired the .name domain extension, but does anyone care? I never liked it, but that's just me.

Manage tasks quickly and easily
Get reminded, anywhere
Organize the way you want to
Work together to get things done
Search your tasks the smart way

All just some of the capabilities of Remember The Milk. If you're on the go and don't have a PDA to keep you organized, this might do the trick for you.

Americans today spend almost as much on bandwidth – the capacity to move information – as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cell phones, cable television and Internet connections, which is about what we spend on gas and heating oil.

Business cards are as obsolete as fax machines. And like fax machines, business cards have us still using paper to move electronic data from one digital system to another.

“You Suck at Web Design” is a humorous (attempting to be, that is) writing project about life as a web designer in our current flurry of web acronyms, standards compliance, WYSIWYG, style sheets, hacks, digging, 2.0-this and Ajax-that. It’s mostly a commentary on the life of a freelancer, and a horribly lop-side disdain for the corportate world and it’s micro management.

The site looks fantastic and has plenty of visual goodness in the form of videos and more.