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!

A while back, Jossie, a friend of my girlfriend’s, decided she wanted to make someting for the UK charity site pimpthatsnack.com, which features giant versions of everyday snacks and treats, sells ads against their hyooge traffic, and donates all the skrilla to charity.

Now, most projects on the site are big candy bars or marshmallows or something, but Jossie had a better ideas — to make a giant version of one of those liquor-filled chocolate bottles. It was quite a process, with much scientific experimentation and sampling of the key ingredients. The girls loved it — getting drunk and eating chocolate at the same time. You can see the final product below. Click here to see more pictures and read about how to make one of your own >

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>

1. Always interesting: Harper’s Weekly Review »
2. A scientific estimate of how many of Shakespeare’s atoms are in your body »
3. Ars reviews the Joost beta for the Mac »
4. More Mac news: At long last, BonziBuddy has been brought to the Mac! »
5. Looks like Windows Vista only needs 4 gigs of ram for optimal performance »
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8. A review of Explode, a competitor to MyBlogLog »
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10. Behold, y’all: The first minute of the Aqua Teen Movie »

Check out this best-of-craigslist post with fifteen reasons why geeks and nerds are better to date. Most important: reason #7 — sex.

But what if you’re a cardinal geek and also an ex-football-playing jock? Hmm..

Read the post »

I was just going through Google’s results for MoodLogic, a company I used to design software and webistes for (I was *ahem* Director of Product Design *ahem*) to see if I showed up anywhere, and I came across this blogger’s old review of our MP3 jukebox software. Here’s some of what he had to say:

Ran into the MoodLogic 2.0 MP3 organizer this morning, and I think it’s the best answer I’ve seen to everyone’s growing MP3 libraries.

It’s really nice to see grassroots appreciation like that for something I helped create, even if it was so long ago. MoodLogic had its problems, but many of them were due to the time it was founded (right before the dot-com crash in 2000) and there were a lot of smart, hardworking people who put their best efforts into the company. Now if iTunes would just incorporate MoodLogic’s technology, life would be sweet — no more untagged MP3s and useless genre information!

This is another good article for website developers by John Chow, this time on whether it’s better to focus on building a few large sites, or a bunch of smaller ones.

He points out that larger sites are easier to promote & manage, and they get better deals with advertisers since they’re easier for advertisers to deal with. While this point may be less true for well-integrated networks of sites (like Gawker Media or Weblogs Inc.), it still stands to reason that it’s easier to create the coveted snowball effect with fewer sites & brands to promote than more.

Read the article »

This is a nice article by John Chow on the most effective (honest) techniques to get other sites to link to yours. It’s good advice, though it’s easy to get caught up in all the comment whoring social networking and forget to give people an actual reason to visit your site.

Now to cook up some link bait… it’s easier said than done!

1. Just in time for Mardi Gras: Top ten alcohol & boobie-related gadgets »
2. Hilarious Video Review: Dr. Ashen on The Best Game Console Evar »
3. C O M P L E X I T Y: A great HDR photo of a floating oil rig »
4. Read/Write Web’s comprehensive online video industry index »
5. Consumerist: Who’s more vile, Exxon or Time Warner Cable? Vote »
6. Fascinating timelapse of a year of online graffiti at drawball.com »
7. Very Cool: Digg will adopt OpenID »
8. Interesting: complex Amazon front page generates more sales »
9. Funny: FSJ on why the iPhone will be delayed »
10. How to be a giant douchebag playboy in 3 easy steps »

1. More on HDMI Cable Ripoffs »

   Ars Technica has a nice price comparison of HDMI cables that all produce the same image quality but have wildly different prices.

2. Remove DRM from HD-DVD Discs »

   The Inquirer discusses the latest release of AnyDVD, whick will remove DRM from standard and HD-DVDs. Huzzah for fair use!

3. Ruby Implementation Speed Shootout »

   Just what the title says, a very thourough comparison of several Ruby implementations. Looks like the next major release (1.9) will be much faster. This is great news for Rails sites.

4. World’s Largest Tropical Glacier Vanishing »

   Really not surprising, but the world’s largest tropical ice mass, in Peru, is shrinking by 60 meters per year. Sell your oceanfront property…

5. AOL is taking steps to support OpenID »

   This is a pleasant surprise to me. I hope OpenID becomes a standard — I hate creating new accounts at every website I join.

6. Why do we have pubic hair? »

   Hint: it’s all about the stink…

7. Cringely on the 40-gig Hard Drives in the AppleTV »

   Bob’s theory is that Apple will use them for p2p-enabled pre-seeding of downloads so that people can get HD iTunes content lickety-split. An interesting idea, but it would require a big installed base.

8. Folding Paper 12 Times »

   A math student figured out how to do this seemingly impossible task.

9. Project Babylon: The Story of Supergun Creator Howard Bull »

   A nice article from Damn Interesting on the tragic tale of Howard Bull, an artillery engineer obsessed with building a gun that could shoot satellites into orbit.

10. 8 diseases that give you superhuman powers »

    An interesting look at brain diseases that affect people in surprising ways.