picnik comes with a free-to-use image editing API for your website

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…

Send your images to their service (existing image via URL or encoded as multi-part)
Then the user modifies the picture (size, colors, rotation, special effects…)
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 →

automatically strip attributes of an ActiveRecord model

You know the situation when some users add a couple of whitespaces to the front or/and the end of a value they just entered into your application? Yeah, and in most cases we dont really want those blanks in our data. But on the other hand we can not really blame them because sometimes it just happens by mistake. Just imagine your cat played with the space bar while you quickly went for a coffee. The solution is not to get rid of the cat, … Its rahter an extension. And no not to your cat – small extension to ActiveRecord Continue reading →

coding for food

I hope that this is not really real