I’ve been working for TechValidate for almost a year now as the lead designer and frontend developer. I should have mentioned it here sooner, but it’s been an intense ride and I haven’t had time to update this site very often.

I’m proud of my work there — I think it’s some of my best yet, although I will always see room for improvement!  Working here has been great because I work with outstanding people that always pull their own weight, and I’ve been given a much greater degree of control and responsibility than ever before as an employee.

We’re also doing very well, despite the current economy, and I’m Looking forward to continued success for the company in 2009.

About the company:

Founded in 2007 and based in Silicon Valley, TechValidate is the first and only truly automated software platform for the collection and generation of customer-sourced marketing and sales collateral. TechValidate solves the problem of extracting quantifiable operational and financial metrics from the 90% or more of the customer base that is not referenceable today.

The company’s solution combines a unique mix of social networking, customer relationship management, and market research into a single web-based offering. By leveraging Web 2.0 principles like crowdsourcing and user generated content, TechValidate captures more customer voices faster than traditional approaches. In fact, TechValidate routinely increases customer participation rates by 3X or more with our clients. As a result, technology vendors can realize the full potential of their greatest marketing asset – their customer base.

Visit the company’s website here ->

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!

I finally had the time to put the finishing touches on my first open-source Rails project — Kropper, an easy-to-use image cropper that’s well-suited to cropping user-profile images and other cases where you want a cropped image to have a certain aspect-ratio.

Features

• It’s easy to use, and it looks pretty sweet.
• Very little Ruby code to add to your app, especially if you’re using attachment_fu to handle images.
• It works with either ImageScience or Rmagick as the backend image processor.
• It’s been tested in IE 6 & 7, Firefox 1.5 & 2, and Safari 2.0.4.
• You can decide whether images are just cropped to the shape of your cropping stencil, or also resized to actual size of the stencil.
• You can easily change the UI around—the appearance, size, and shape of everyting, including the cropping canvas and cropping stencil, are defined with CSS.

Here’s what it looks like. Click on the screenshot to go to the demo site, try it out, and get the source for Kropper (and the whole demo site).

Let me know what you think of it! Now if I can just find time to finish my Captcha plugin…

Update: Kropper now has a rubyforge project page!

Teensylink is a free link-shrinking and link-protecting website I built as an exercise to learn the Ruby on Rails web development framework.

Give Teensylink a URL and it’ll give you back a short ‘teensylink’ in the form of http://teensylink.com/xxxxx, where the xxxxx is a unique 5-digit code. If you visit the teensylink in your browser, you’re redirected to the original link.

You can also add password-protection and CAPTCHA-protection to your teensylinks, and view realtime stats on how many visits your teensylinks have recieved. There’s also a bookmarklet you can drag to your browser toolbar so you can create a teensylink any page you visit with one click.

Why would anyone use a tool like this?

• Long links often break in email, including Gmail. Teensylinks won’t.
• Easy password-protection of links
• Easy CAPTCHA-protection of links to stop spiders & robots from following links
• Free realtime stats

Check it out>