Web Dev Bros

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… Continue reading ‘picnik comes with a free-to-use image editing API for your website’ »

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.

Today i stumbled across a nice tool called Pastie. Pastie helps you if you want to show some bits of your source code to someone else. e.g. you need some help, advice (or you just want to show off with your code). You paste an excerpt of your code and pastie saves it for under a unique URL. Then you send this URL to the person you want to show the code. The big advantage here is that the syntax is nicely highlighted … very nice for remote troubleshooting! I have created a code snippet for demonstration.

(i’ve used code sections to create more sections.)

Two days ago the guys at google released a brand new api. It’s called Google Chart API. and is free for approx. 50.000 requests per day. This should be enough for smaller projects ;) The interface is quite easy: You call URL’s for your desired graphs. Also the Data is passed directly via the URL as parameters. I did not have the time yet to experiment a lot with it but from the first sight it looks very professional and i will give it a try in one of my administration areas. Here is a custom made example where I illustrate the visitors of webdevbros from the past two weeks in a nice graph… Continue reading ‘Google released free chart API (usage example)’ »

With the web 2.0 a lot of online boomark services came up, the most prominent might be del.icio.us. I really like the idea of having all my bookmarks online so i can access them from wherever I want and I don’t need to backup them by myself etc. I tried del.icio.us and some others but never was really satisfied because every service missed some feature i’d like to have in such a service.

Must have features:

• Possibility to group bookmarks in folders
• Possibility to tag bookmarks
• search through them
• make them public or private
• plugin to access the bookmarks in FF or IE
• Import/Export your bookmarks

Nice to have features:

• share them with friends
• random bookmarks
• recommended bookmarks

Finally I found the free GPL’d online bookmark service called Chipmark, which actually has all the features mentioned above. I can highly recommend it since I use it every day, in IE and FF. They also started to provide a public webservice API that you can use in your own applications. By now you can login and the get all your folders and links. This might be really usefull for some people.

Wow, that was finally my first article here :-) I hope it is usefull for somebody.

Today I’ve found a nice site which brings together a lot of API’s into one place. A quick look into CSS, Javascript, XSL, Ruby, Hibernate, Oracle, MySQL, etc. normally requires a set of bookmarks on you machine. This tool has them all in one place! Check www.gotapi.com . What I really like is the autocomplete search feature and the organisation of the tabs. Thus it can be fully customized to your everyday development. Great idea!

Unfortunately there is no reference of any Microsoft technology (which is really a pain for me and i am sure for others as well) or Selfhtml which is a nice web reference for all german developers.

Some weeks ago I had to build a couple of regular expressions for my classic ASP apps and I was sick of playing around directly in the code. For this purpose I’ve created a small web tool which helps me playing & testing around directly in a web form. Type in a regex pattern, set some options and test if it executes as desired or not.

The tool is available at Continue reading ‘VBScript Regular Expression builder’ »