Sometimes as a web developer you may get an idea in your head that you want to try out, but by the time you get the necessary files in place you may have forgotten what you were going to do.

There are some great tools out there for testing a website's performance including Web Page Test, Stella, and WatchMouse. Those are the three that I regularly find myself using, but the website monitoring service Pingdom recently updated their Full Page Test tool blowing many others out of the water.

I recently heard about a service called BrowserStack that I just had to try out. We've seen services before that let you view a screenshot of what your site looks like in other browsers, but nothing comes close to what this has to offer. You literally get hands-on time with your site in Firefox, IE, Chrome, Safari, and Opera with a wide array of versions supported.

If you're a web developer there is a good chance that you've had to mess around with a lot of CSS code. It's not the easiest thing in the world to work with, but there are tools out there that try to guide you along the way.

Creating patterns that are repeatable and look good is something designers spend a lot of time working on. I recently came across an awesome site called Subtle Patterns that looks to make this a little easier for non-designers by providing us with a small image that we can use to repeat across an entire website's background.

Finding fonts to use on your website can be a pain, but a lot of people don't realize that Google has an interface for finding and using fonts on any site. Google Web Fonts lets you see samples of over 200 fonts in either a single word, sentence, or paragraph format.

Windows only We've covered several regular expression tools here on the site that make generating and testing your regex code easy, and today we've got a Windows app that does a bit more hand-holding. Expresso is a free (requires free registration) tool that has a built-in library of various expressions ready to be used, but also includes an Expression Builder for making your own.

Web developers are probably familiar with tools such as Firebug that make troubleshooting CSS styles a lot easier since the changes show up in realtime.

Adding good search functionality to your site can often be a pain, but Sikbox wants to help make it easier. They are offering a no-hassle method to adding a search box to your site using JavaScript. Results will appear for users as they type, and Yahoo! is the search engine that powers the results.

As our regular readers know I am the developer behind the CyberSearch Firefox extension, and I wanted to say thanks to all of our users for their bug reports... and especially Ronin who pointed out a doozy. He keeps up with nightly Firefox builds, and is kind enough to point out when some of our extension's features break.

Firebug is well known to web developers as one of the best tools to have at your side when trying to debug website issues. Many have said that it's a priceless tool, and at one point Joe Hewitt wasn't sure if it would remain free. He questioned whether users would be willing to shell out $15-$25 for an extension, but he strayed from the paid route in favor of keeping it open source.

I always find myself using regular expressions (a.k.a. regex) in my programming because they are often the best way to parse out bits and pieces from blocks of text. Ever since I discovered the online RegExr that has been my tool of choice, but sometimes it's nice to have a dedicated application. Programs like RegexBuddy are awesome, but aren't free.

I'm not sure how many of you have decided to take part in the Monopoly City Streets game, but one of my friends pointed out something interesting. The game was promoted as being powered by Google Maps, but looking into the FAQ's reveals that the data is not solely coming from Google.