This morning a light bulb went off. At last! I had an event to Twitter about.

I packed up my trusty laptop and off I went to Living in Full Bloom: A Celebration of Cancer Survivorship. Not only that, I checked Twitter on my iPhone just in case wireless wasn’t working.

As the crowd of 500 or so settled down, I started up as discreetly as I could. Of course, how discreet can one be when yours is the only laptop at the event?

Following an invocation, Ruth McGinnis, an ovarian cancer survivor, pulled out her violin and together with her band, launched into a gorgeous melody — St. Anne’s Reel. I feebly tweeted again, but when she started to tell the story of her cancer, I just couldn’t do it any more. It felt disrespectful. I would be horrified if someone Twittered in a church service. And while there were photographers and a video crew, nonetheless this had more in common with church than a media event. She spoke from her heart of living with cancer, and the crowd responded, creating a patchwork of deeply touching stories.

So have I now resolved my Twitter dilemna? Does this mean I can now safely dispense with it? Alas, no. Life is messy. As I was getting ready to Twitter earlier in the day, I happened on a tweet by Barack Obama,: “Thanking Hillary. Our party & our country are stronger because of the work she has done.” I followed the link and it led me to a form where I too could (and did) thank Senator Clinton. This is Web 2.0 at its best.

And I’m still lost in Twitterland.

Do you have certain sites you search routinely? For me, it’s php.net, mysql.com, and Vanderbilt (as well as the usual suspects like Wikipedia and Google Images). If you’re using Firefox or Opera, here’s an easy way to speed that up.

When you’re on a website you search frequently, right click in the search box, give it a name (e.g. “php.net”) and, more importantly, enter a keyword (e.g. “php”). This adds it to your bookmarks, but with a twist.

The next time you want to search the site, all you have to do is type your keyword followed by your search terms in the browser address box at the top. You bypass Google and the site’s home page. So, if I wanted to search for the PHP strtok function, I’d just type “php strtok” and go right to the page.

[Hat tip to Patrick Norton and Tekzilla Daily.]

Last summer I kept hearing how awesome, marvelous, superb, etc., etc., Firebug was. I could tell this Firefox extension classified as a must-have for all web developers. So I installed it, twiddled with it a little, and assumed that with a bit of use I’d catch on to why it was so great. But then I forgot about it.

Recently I started bumping into more Firebug kudos, including some video tutorials. I looked at the tutorials, but they were too fast. Nonetheless they caught my interest and motivated me to try again.

In my search for a decent tutorial, I returned to the Firebug home page. It turned out that’s all I needed in the first place. So my advice to web developers who haven’t tried Firebug is to install it and give yourself about 10 minutes to review its home page. Specifically, click on the “learn more” links and work your way through as many tips as your brain can handle.

You’ll be amazed. You can alter the look of any page. Do you want to turn Google’s home page black? You can do it with Firebug, albeit fleetingly and only in your own browser window.

More to the point, you can quickly test adjustments to pages you’re working on. Just try turning off lines of CSS on the fly, and I bet you’ll be hooked too.

• Firebug

Like any self-respecting web diva, one of my first jobs on a new laptop is to turn it into a development server. In other words, I need Apache, PHP and MySQL running on my own machine where no one else can see it and I can be as bad as I want to be.

In the past, I’ve had to do this the old-fashioned way, jumping through various scary hoops like downloading raw PHP and editing obscure hidden files. But that was then.

In the intervening years, a series of app’s named things like WAMP and MAMP have come along. (Gotta love techno-babble.) These AMP’s do all this heavy lifting for you. “AMP” stands for Apache, PHP and MySQL. If you tack a W on the front, it’s for a Windows machine. If you tack an M on instead, it’s for (you guessed it) Mac OSX.

I’d heard about MAMP before, but installing is believing. In fact it was so easy I started frantically looking for fancy instructions, but just couldn’t find any. In the end, after downloading, unzipping and moving MAMP to the Applications folder, I finally crossed my fingers and double-clicked it. Voila — in about 10 seconds everything was done for me. It even gives you various choices, like PHP 4 or PHP 5.

And now, just a few hours later, I have localhost copies of things like Drupal running on my little old MacBook. I’m free to be as bad as I want to be.

Yesterday I was in a pinch. Thank the web diva heavens for SurveyMonkey.

Weeks ago I promised to compose an online survey for my church’s Stewardship Committee, but then in the holiday hustle-bustle, not to mention being absent-minded, I forgot all about it.

Last night at 2:00AM the jig was up. I sat down and, with some trepidation, signed up for an account. It turns out that even getting an account is a breeze. You just give them your email address, pick a handle for yourself, and you’re in. Of course, it’s a limited account. You need to pay for bigger projects. But limited (under 100 respondents and under 10 questions) was good enough for our needs.

Next, you add your questions using an intuitive dialog box, and then choose your venue. I selected being assigned a URL to distribute in emails and to link to from our site.

Now all we have to do is distribute said URL. Once responses come in, there’s a handsome and presumably revealing results analysis cumulated for you.

My web diva tool chest just got noticeably richer. And I suspect paying for a larger account would be money well spent.