Found this useful tip on how to add a ping shortcut to your Firefox address bar over at Lifehacker. I love its simplicity. Pinging servers is a great way of finding out if they are currently up and running. The time it takes to receive a response is measured in milliseconds and a timeout is returned if it takes to long.
<sep/>inspection tool - similar to Firebug. NitobiBug runs across different browsers (IE6+, Safari, Opera, Firefox) to provide a consistent and powerful tool for developing rich Ajax applications.