joel's thoughts

In the “thanks for a job well done” category…

Snipshot
Snipshot is a website that will let you upload a picture and do a few basic photo-editing tasks (like resize, crop, etc.) right in your browser, with quick multi-step undo, and save the results back to your computer. They provide a sample image you can play with first, if you like. Oh, and it’s free. 🙂

So the next time you take pictures with your 5 megapixel camera (which, by the way, means REALLY BIG in terms of file size as well as picture size — all those bits have to go somewhere) and you want to email them all to your extended family and friends, and you don’t have something handy like F-Spot or Picasa installed, take a few minutes at Snipshot and size them down a bit.

Simple Machines Forum (SMF)
This is a little more on the geek-specific side, but I’ve recently started running a private online forum for some adoptive families and have been quite pleased with the Simple Machines Forum software. I was trying to get something set up quickly, and it was available as a quick-install package with my hosting provider, so I figured I’d check it out. It has become, in my mind, another example of solid, quality software put out by the open source community. To be sure, their license is open source more in spirit than in technicality — they pull back from the open re-distribution aspects of typical OSS licenses but you’re more than welcome to tinker with their code. But as a team they function just the same as other OSS projects, and I’m quite impressed with the result.