After much uploading of photos and typing of text, my friend and fellow sculptor Steve Shaheen has told me I can take the wraps off of Tuscany Study, a website I recently built for his painting and sculpting courses in Italy. This was a fun project that allowed me to design a look that balances a rich, earthy color scheme with an elegant, contemporary aesthetic. It was also fun to help Steve figure out how to distill and present information about his courses to prospective participants. After building the site, I can’t wait to get to Italy myself. Who knows, maybe this will buy me a free trip…

Tim Lucas, of the very popular toolmantim.com Rails blog has saved me a good deal of work by wrapping the Kropper code into a Rails plugin. He’s also using Kropper on webjam.com.au. This is great news, and it’s really gratifying to me that a) people like my first open-source project enough to contribute code to it, and b) someone as smart and talented as Tim is contributing. I’ve read Tim’s blog quite a bit since I started working with Rails, and it feels great that to be collaborating with one of the people I’ve learned from.

Update: Tim has finished his pluginized version of Kropper! You can access his plugin source via SVN or your web browser here: http://rubyforge.org/scm/?group_id=3936. I’ll post another update when I get around to refactoring the demo app to use the pluginized code.

http://dailyfratze.de/ is a website that lets users create their own ‘picture-a-day’ photologs. It’s a very cool service, and a great place for Kropper to be used. When users upload their photos, Michael’s using Kropper to let his users control how their images get cropped to the right format for their daily photologs. Now, let’s get this site in English!