Observu is free service which informs you if one of your sites is down. Simple register all your websites with them and receive an email notification if one of them is dead. Nice!

If you want to know what’s new in Rails 2.1 or think that you may have missed a new feature, you should check out the e-book “Ruby on Rails 2.1. What’s new?“.

There are all new features described with an example. It’s quite amazing to see how rails evolves.
btw: did you know that there is finally an i18n patch in edge rails, to be released with rails 2.2? this is a solid foundation for other plugins to build on.

Did you ever wanted to take a look at cookies or even tweak them? Having access to your cookies as a developer is crucial but even as a user it might be useful to take a look sometimes.

But what about querying them with sql queries? Picture this: Show me all cookies from localhost and order them by expirydate. No problem, I’ll show you how… (more…)

Did you ever run a popular website or serivce/product? If yes, then you know how hard it can be to discover which new features your users want. Collecting all the requests, giving response and analyzing which requests are most popular. All those tasks require a lot of organization and take some time. UserVoice offers a serivce which provides exactly those features. For your site visitors:

1. They submit ideas or vote for existing ideas
2. They discuss ideas with each other and with you
3. They get official reponse (featre planned, started, etc.)
4. They get heard!

Perfect service! Will definitely use it in my future projects…

As usual the guys at google have been busy and released a nice new feature for their (quite new) google chart api. It support 2D bar codes also known as QR codes. Whats more, they even offer a free decoding library for it (Xzing). Big respect googlers to your free APIs

Did you ever wanted to stay up to date with websites/pages which actually don’t offer any feed(s)? Yeah me too! page2rss.com/ is our life saver. It let us subscribe to any webpage and thus monitor all its changes. I love it! my sleepless nights are gone now, cause i know i won’t miss anything anymore …

Many of you already know that the FamFamFam icons are probably the most famous out there. At least i know plenty of apps using it - including me. Today i have found a new great icon set from pro theme design including 117 icons:

Get Circular Icons here

Today a work collegue showed me a nice tool (website) called browsershots which tests a given website in all the browsers you want. The nice thing is that it really supports a hell lot of browsers (incl. different versions .. IE5, IE6, IE7, FF1.5, FF2.0, FF3) and that it shows you screenshots of how it looks like. I love it - because its a real mission to get all of them working locally on your machine .. especially the different IE versions :) I have tried using it with webdevbros and here is a screenshot of how it looks like after processing it for 3 minutes… (more…)

Ever heard from Picnik? It allows you editing your images direclty within your browser. Forget Adobe Photoshop :) Picnik has been around for a while now but recently it started to offer its service for the public. for free! I played around a bit and must say that it is amazing .. Use it within PHP, classic ASP, .net, Ruby on Rails or whatever… especially i like the idea of the whole service which works like this…

1. Send your images to their service (existing image via URL or encoded as multi-part)
2. Then the user modifies the picture (size, colors, rotation, special effects…)
3. Picnik sends you the picture back to your server (either an URL where you can download it or directly as multi-part image)

Here comes an example I have built for demonstration… (more…)

Today i have found scripteka.com which is an awesome resource for prototype and scriptaculous extensions. It offers one of the best extensions around on a very clear and web2ish site. Currently they offer 88 extensions which include javascript calendars, password strength meters, reflection generators, image croppers, faders, …. Go to scripteka.com and look yourself what they offer. Its good stuff which is based on one of the best libraries out there.