Easy online image cropping application at Quick Thumbnail

I recently expanded the functionality of Quick Thumbnail to include a Quick Image Cropping tool. This tool lets you crop an image by uploading a file or by entering a URL to the image file. Once uploaded, Quick Cropping allows you to select the cropped area and each time you press the Crop button a new output is generated. No need to reload the image, simply adjust the selection area and press crop again.

Active Cropping Window:

Cropped Results:

Link:
http://quickthumbnail.com/crop/

Quickthumbnail adds Watermark feature

You can now add watermarks to any image while your resizing it at Quick Thumbnail. The text is rendered as part of the image. Like everything else I develop for free this was done to play around with a code technique, in this case rendering text onto an image.

For now I only give basic control over the text: The phrase, color (either light or dark) and a choice of three sizes.

Comments?

Link:
http://www.quickthumbnail.com/

My custom Facebook URL

I am now:
http://www.facebook.com/veign

Thought that was the best URL I could get.

Veign releases two new online tools

Keeping in with the spirit of Veign, I have released two new free tools. This adds to Veign's collection of 18+ free online tools and applications.

Site Check: Site Check saves you time by compiling a list of websites, with your URL pre-filled in, to check your website in. No need to fill in your website multiple times. This makes manually checking your website a much easier process.

Domain Age Check: Return the age of domain.

As always, if you have any idea for a tool feel free to contact Veign.

Get a detailed website check from Veign

Veign is now providing a service where we do a complete website check / analysis. From identifying website problems before your visitors do to search engine optimization guideline checks to ensure your site is ready for the major search engines, our report will give you the knowledge to fix those pesky problems that are often difficult to track down.

Link:
http://www.veign.com/website-check.php

Latest website from Veign

Very happy to release a new website called Primal Management. I really like the way this website came out and think it will do the book justice.

Check out the website and check out the book, Primal Management.

Check out the snow on Veign.com

A little something for the Holiday season:
http://www.veign.com/

Cfont Pro on LifeHacker

For typography junkies with large font collections, Cfont Pro will help you manage your addiction. With support for all the major font file types, including Postscript and TrueType, this free application will let you preview fonts from disk before installing...

Link:
http://lifehacker.com/5069461/...

Cfont Pro:
http://www.cfontpro.com/

Cfont Pro makes a Smashing Magazine blog post

Cfont Pro made smashing magazine's 25 Font Management Tools Reviewed blog post. Its near the bottom of the blog post.

If you use Cfont Pro cast a vote at the bottom of the smashing magazine post.

Online htpasswd Creator

Online htpasswd Creator is an easy way to create properly encrypted passwords for use in an htpasswd file. The htpasswd file is reference from an htaccess file to protect files and folders.

Link:
http://www.veign.com/tools/htpasswd-creator/

Distance Check now has active city lookup

Distance Check gives you the approximate driving time between two zip codes. A new active city lookup feature now makes the tool even easier to use. What it will do is give you a drop-down of zip codes matching any town or city as you type in the zip code field. So now you can either type the city code or start typing a town or city and Distance Check will find the zip code for you.

Tell me what you think.

Link:
http://distancecheck.com/

My new 404 error page

Link to sample:
http://www.veign.com/

Comments? Let me know what you think about it.

Useful MySQL SQL statements

Useful MySQL SQL statements is a list of some useful and maybe tricky SQL statements for MySQL.

Veign: My latest website design

See more at:
http://www.veign.com/design-portfolio.php

Also, check out my development portfolio

Cfont Pro: Font Manager v3 released

The next version of Cfont Pro, font manager, has been released. This version brings some new tools and makes it compatible with Windows Vista, finally.

Whats New:

• Now supported on Windows Vista
• Redesign Font Browser to include an always displayed Folder Browser
• Brand new Quick Detailed Viewer lets you see all fonts with key information in a single location
• New Zoomer tool lets you see the details of any font and any character
• Added a Property Toolbar to let change some properties instead using the Property Window
• Glyph viewer lets you see how a font character is constructed

This version was going to include a lot more things but since I have some other projects that are taking focus I thought I would release it just to get people on the newer version.

Cfont Pro is Free

Link:
http://www.cfontpro.com/
or
http://www.veign.com/application.php?appid=101

Make Password back online

Make Password is back online after a server issue that caused it to not function properly. Thanx to a very helpful person it was brought to my attention and all is resolved.

Link:
http://www.maord.com/

Password strength value added to Make Password

Make Password has been expanded to included a Password Strength value that can be added to the generated password list. This value is a number from 0 to 100 with 100 being a very strong password and 0 being a weak password.

I think this can help when people are creating large lists of passwords as you will now know the strength of the password.

Want something else added or have comments about Make Password then please feel free to drop by the Forum.

Link:
http://www.maord.com/

How strong are your passwords?

Microsoft has an online Password Strength Checker that will let you know. If your passwords are too weak, or you are looking for password ideas, then check out the article on How to create strong passwords.

Also, if you're looking to make a whole bunch of passwords at a single time then check out Veign's Online Password Creator.

Link:
http://.../protect/yourself/password/checker.mspx

Why so silent?

I am traveling for the next couple of weeks part for business and part for pleasure. The first half of the trip is to Champaign, IL to do some work with a local company. The second half is off to CT to visit family. Road trip.

If you see me on the road get my attention some how - lets see if anyone can find me (car pictured above with the license plate of Veign and tinted windows). So going from Champaign, IL to near Waterbury CT on Friday Oct 5th / 6th and CT to Columbia, SC on Oct 13th/14th.

Catch me if you can...

More tools for SEO

• Page Strength Checker: Gives information about any URL that let you determine the strength of a page. Age of the domain, number of backlinks and PageRank are displayed.
• PageRank: Check the PageRank of any page at 37 Google data centers. Gives a great overview of how Google's data centers see your PageRank.
• SEOMoz Tools: A great collection of some very useful tools like: Back Anchor Text Analysis, Crawl text and many more.
• Xinu: An all in one page information tool. Enter a URL and get everything you can imagine about the web page.

More tools:
http://.../the-top-15-free-seo-tools.html

Note-it gets a needed updated

Note-It is one of my most popular applications. This is a very simple, easy to use post-it type application. This update adds the ability for a new notes will be prompted to be saved if needed. This means when you start a note you won't lose what you typed if you forgot to save.

It's Freeware, actually Postcardware (send me a postcard if you like the application) but same difference.

Link:
http://www.veign.com/application.php?appid=102

Quick Thumbnail: Online Image Resizer: "The fastest way to resize your pictures and images."

Quick Thumbnail gets even more new things:

• More filters. Quick Thumbnail now supports: Greyscale, Sepia, Negative, Emboss, Blur, Sketch, Edge
  
• You can now resize images from a URL

Have an idea for an improvement then contact me or leave a post on the Quick Thumbnail Forum.

Online Image Resizer

Quick Thumbnail on the Kim Komando Show

Congratulations! Your Web site is being featured in The Kim Komando Show Cool Site of the Day on September 7, 2007.

Just received this email. This will generate some great traffic for my Online Image Resizer. Very cool!

Quick Thumbnail:
http://quickthumbnail.com/

Kim Komando:
http://www.komando.com

QuickThumbnail gets a filter

Quick Thumbnail: Online Image Resizer: "The fastest way to resize your pictures and images."

Quick Thumbnail gets a new feature and some foundation for future improvements.

• Added Greyscale filter. Sepia filter was there but its way too slow for larger images - needs to be refined and made much more efficient before I can release it.
  
• Foundation is set to allow resizing from URLs. I just need to figure out the best way to add this to the interface. This will be coming soon.
  

Online Image Resizer

My wish list on Amazon

I figured nobody would buy anything off the list so I picked out the most expensive things that I would want.

Link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/2IZCUAAFXJPGJ

Do you like Horror movies?

Then check out the Horror and Sci-Fi news mashup site I put together. I did it for myself because I wanted something I could quickly navigate to to see what happening in the world of horror.

Pass it along to anyone who you think may be interested.

Link:
http://scarymind.com/

Veign goes tribal

I have designed two new shirt designs for CafePress for Veign. I wanted a design that used some tribal designs to make it look a bit more interesting. Note: Even though the shirt previews aren't high quality looking the shirts and the images will be.

What do you think?

Link:
http://www.cafepress.com/veign

Cfont Pro gets a minor release

I released a very minor update to Cfont Pro, my Font Manager, which enhances a few things and sets the ground work for some additional features. I already have another version coming together but will wait and compile a larger release.

Oh, and this application is Donationware (free).

Link:
http://www.cfontpro.com/

Another news mashup website

ScaryMind is a horror news mashup site that I threw together quickly to read about another one of my interests. I figured I would put it on a domain of mine that was not being used for anything else and that way if anyone else has interest they could use the service too.

Link:
http://scarymind.com/

In case you're interested the other news mashup website was HorseURLs.com.

Website page layout templates using CSS

Some great examples of page layouts using CSS as the primary layout method;

CSS Layouts:
http://layouts.ironmyers.com/

Layout Galore:
http://blog.html.it/layoutgala/

Even more layouts:
http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/box_lesson/boxes.html

If you need a custom designed website then check out my website design services.

Veign's new development portfolio

A decided to not only display the websites I have done but also start showcasing some of the features of websites that I have done and can do for clients. I'm hoping to continue growing this new development portfolio over the next couple months as I gather more information to add.

Development Portfolio:
http://www.veign.com/development-portfolio.php

Design Portfolio:
http://www.veign.com/design-portfolio.php

HorseURLs just released - Another website by Veign.

Latest and greatest in my suite of Horse websites. This site is very similiar to PopURLs, in fact thats where the idea came from, in the sense it pulls all the news sources together in one location.

Has become one of the largest collections of the best articles on anything and everything horse. This site is a must bookmark for anyone interested in horses.


A great, ever changing, collection of horse pictures from around the world.


A community for horse people to hang out and get involved in discussions. This is a very friendly forum with some of the best or the best getting involved.


That's it and all the above sites have been designed and developed by me.

How to clean the HTML code from Word

I released another tool that can be used to throw together quick web pages and page elements called Easy HTML Editor. This is a really cool tool for making quick page elements and has a feature that I use and that's the ability to clean the code from MS Word (instructions provided on the page).

Feel free to play around with it and make suggestions for improvements.

Link:
http://www.veign.com/tools/easy-html-editor/

A big thanx to FCKEditor for all their hard work on this amazing component.

Veign on Yahoo Local Live

Veign is now on Yahoo Local Live. Who cares, right? Correct, but posting here will get the page into Google's index faster.

SCIway - Veign is the website of the day

SCIway - South Carolina Information Highway has chosen Veign as the "Website of the Day". SCIway is one of the best sources for information on South Carolina around and I'm proud to be selected as the website of the day.

Cool.

Link:
http://www.sciway.net/

Calculate the distance between two zip codes

A fun little online application that calculates the distance between two zip codes. The distance is calculated and general information about each zip code, a map for each zip code and approximate driving time is displayed.

Why?

Like most stuff I do its practice. This one was practicing with Zip Codes and calculating zip codes that may fall within a certain radius of others. The best way for me to practice is to make something and usually after its made I create a website out of it in case others find some use.

Link:
http://distancecheck.com/

A few new tools from Veign

• PageRank / Backlink Check: Get Google Pagerank, backlinks from Google / Yahoo / MSN, and much more on one or more URL's
• Ultra Fast Whois: One of the fastest whois lookups around.
• Reflection: See what you look like to the websites that you visit
• Make Password: By far the fastest and easiest way to create random passwords.

One day I need to write a comprehensive post of all the online tools and applications I have.

Google PageRank and Backlinks Checker

I wasn't sure I was going to post about this but what the heck, I post about everything else. Another tool from Veign that can give you a compact report of Google Pagerank and backlinks from various search engines in a single report. The reason I wasn't going to post about it is because its more of a tool for my needs and not sure if anyone else would even care to know about it. For now its limited to a mazimum of 10 URLs but may expand if my needs exceed 10 or I hear enough comments that request more.

Link:
http://www.veign.com/tools/pagerank/

Clear the Internet Explorer Typed Address History

Did you know that in Internet Explorer the URL you type into the address bar are stored in the registry. Even if you clean your history these URL's will remain active in the IE address bar history.

How to clean:

1. Start menu -> Run -> Regedit
2. Navigate to the key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs]
3. With the key highlighted in the left view pane you can see the typed in URLs in the right view pane
4. Delete values as required or remove the entire key (IE will recreate the key when needed)
   

I know there are tools that will automatically clean this history for you but I don't want a whole application for something I clean only every few months or so. What I did was create a registry hack that will delete the typed in URL key in the registry (it will be recreated by IE when you need it). Download it and double-click it the .reg file and your history will be cleaned.

Link to reg hack:
http://www.veign.com/registry-hacks.php

Extract some useful information from your Jpeg images

Did you know that when you take a picture with your digital camera a bunch of information is stored inside of the Jpeg file? Its called the Exif data and stores information such as camera information, camera settings, and a thumbnail of the picture taken. Even after cropping an image the thumbnail can show the original picture that was taken.

I created an online application called Camera Summary that shows you whats inside of the images. It displays all the information and will even show you the stored thumbnail.

Check it out (using a Jpeg taken from a digital camera) and leave a comment or digg it...

Link:
http://camerasummary.com/

Veign's redesign finally released

I have finally completed the first stage in the redesign of Veign. More changes to come but was really excited to get this out. Have a look at the new Veign and leave a comment on your thoughts.

Link:
http://www.veign.com

Comments?

Online Converters

Big and comprehensive list of Online Converters. Work checking out as the future is moving to online applications.

Some of mine:

• Online Image Resizer
• Online Password Creator
• See how a server reacts to a domain
• Image Color Report

Have an idea for an online application? Contact me and I'll see if I can get it implemented.

PAD Crawler makes polling my PAD Database easy

I have created a database for PAD** files called PadDatabase.com. This database currently holds information on more than 48,000 applications and growing weekly. The problem that I ran into was I needed a way to poll the PAD files to check for new information, check for PAD files not longer in existence, PAD files that have been introduced into the database from blacklisted companies (I have many and maintain an active blacklist). So, like any good developer, I wrote one.


PAD Crawler is a PHP application that gives me all the tools I need to easily and effectively crawler and poll the entire database. Right now it includes a PAD Crawler, Duplicate Finder, Validity Checker and a Cleanup Tool. This is purely an internal tool to Veign and probably will never been seen by anyone else.


** - PAD files are small XML files that fully describe an application and are commonly used by shareware and freeware authors to distribute information about an application.

Online password creator needs ideas

I created an online password creator to help me in setting up password lists in databases. Basically I had a need for more than 10K random passwords, with hash values, as a default password for a member database.

Well, I am now looking for ideas on how to make the tool better. So, here is your time to let me know what you would like to see, features you want added, or just general ideas.

If you have an idea for a new online tool please feel free to email me directly (email address in my profile) and I just might create your tool.

Link:
http://maord.com/

Picnik, another online image editor.

With Picnik you can quickly edit all your online photos from one place. It's the easiest way on the Web to fix underexposed photos, remove red-eye, or apply effects to your photos.

Unlike others, I gave Picnik a shot since I heard some good things about it. A clean, Flash design makes this one very simple and intuitive to use. Plus its fast. Faster than the other all inclusive online image editors I've reviewed, probably because of the use of Flash.

Link:
http://www.picnik.com

Also, check out my online image applications:
http://www.whatsitscolor.com/
http://quickthumbnail.com/

Page Headers tool now supports user selected Agent

Page Headers now lets you choose the user agent that is used to request the page from the server. Why is this useful? Some websites use underhanded methods to get higher ranking in Google and using Page Headers you can see if they are pushing a different page to Googlebot (Google's spider) than what is push to a user of Firefox. I tried to include some of the more popular agents out there, like: IE, Firefox, Yahoo, Google, MSN, Opera, Askjeeves.

Have one you wanted added? Just ask.

Link:
http://pageheaders.com/

About User Agents:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent

Quick Thumbnail + Whats Its Color = 2 great tools

Are online applications / tools the wave of the future? Will everything be available in an online, thin client version? I think so even though in some ways I just can't seeing it work. There are a few (probably many) applications that just screem to be put online and Image Resizer is one of them.

Quick Thumbnail is a super easy, yet powerful online image resizer that allows you to resize an image from any system regardless of your skill level.

Link:
http://quickthumbnail.com/


Whats its Color is more in the realm of fun applications. Sure it provides useful information that can be used in any type of design but its just fun to play with. What it does is take an image and evaulate every pixel and comes up with the 'colors' of that image. It also goes one step further and displays your image on what is determined to be the best background color to show off that image.

Link:
http://whatsitscolor.com/

See the page headers of any website page

Using a tool like Page Headers you can see how a server responds when you request a page. Not only useful, especially in seeing the paths of redirects, but interesting. See a sample of the Microsoft headers.

Also, this is brought to you by Veign.

More of my online tools:
http://www.veign.com/download_main.asp#online

Page Headers:
http://pageheaders.com/

Whats Its Color by Veign

Whats Its Color is a fun little online application for getting the primary and complementary dominant colors of an image, how many visually unique colors are in an image, and the top ten visually unique colors in an image. Why is this useful? Well, if you were creating a website around an image or using an image as the primary inspiration for any type is design it can be very helpful to know what its primary dominant color is or what are the unique colors that people can see when viewing the image. The final results will display your image on a background that is best suited for that image. This application is just fun to play around with.

Link:
http://www.whatsitscolor.com/

More downloads from me:
http://www.veign.com/download_main.asp

What is this?

Look interesting? Where is it?

Large list of Online Generators

The Online Generators list seems to have everything you could every want out of an online generator.

Highlights:

ASCII Art:
http://www.glassgiant.com/ascii/

Color Blender:
http://www.colorblender.com/

Gradient Creator:
http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/gradient/

Favicon Creator:
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/

A couple I created:

Quick Thumbnail:
http://quickthumbnail.com/

Make Password:
http://www.maord.com/


Link:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/.../online-generators/

Make Password by Veign

Make Password is another tool I threw togther quickly for a personal need and figured I would release in case others had a need. What this online tools does is create lists of random passwords and hash values. Its kinda of useful for individuals looking for inspiration on creating passwords and extremely useful for developers who often need to setup default passwords in a database.

You control the password length, character sets, hash values, quantity to create, and even the method to display the results.

And I know the domain name is weird but finding a good domain was not easy so I settled on a name that combines Make and Password.

Link:
http://www.maord.com/

Quick Thumbnail is getting some exposure

Not only has Quick Thumbnail made it to Download Squad and Shell City but it has just been listed on Lifehacker. All this exposure gets me wanting to start working on the next version.

I like how someone commented on the cheesy web 2.0 logo I put on the site. It was done as a kinda of a joke that stuck.

Quick Thumbnail: The fastest way to resize images online

Quick Thumbnail: Online Image Resizer: "The fastest way to resize your pictures and images."

Just in case you wonder the above online application was created by me so if you have any suggestions to make it better than please drop me a line.

Features:

• Resize by percentage or by pre-defined pixel sizes
• Simultaneous generation of different sizes creates multiple image sizes in one step
• Quick Resize options lets you tweak the size of the image from the results page
• No software to install and works right from your browser
  

Link:
http://quickthumbnail.com/

Cfont Pro - Premium Font Manager is now Donationware

I decided to turn Cfont Pro into a donationware application. This is a 100% optional donationware application with no nag screens, malware, or registration process.

(make sure you use the direct download link until Download.com gets the update)

Enjoy!

Link:
http://www.cfontpro.com/

Veign on Rocketboom!

I love it. Amanda Congdon wearing a Veign shirt on Rocketboom.

Link:
http://www.rocketboom.com/.../rb_06_jun_20.html

In case you want a shirt of your own (not like anybody would but what the hell):
http://www.cafepress.com/veign

They have come a long way, a quick look back

A quick look back to some websites humble beginnings;

Yahoo! - 1996


Yahoo! - Now


Google - 1998


Google - Now


Download.com - 1997


Download.com - Now


Veign - 2001


Veign - 2003

Veign - Now

Add your folders to the Open / Save dialogbox

This is the Windows XP Pro way to customize the Places Bar (folders listed on the left of the dialogbox) in the standard Open / Save dialogbox.

1. Open the Group Policy Editor by opening the start menu -> run -> gpedit.msc
2. Drill down to Windows Explorer User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Common Open File Dialog
3. Double-click the Items displayed in Places Bar setting
4. Make sure the setting is Enabled
5. Customize the Place to display with your folders*.

* - You can use Common Shell Folders by using any of the following folders: CommonDocuments, CommonMusic, CommonPictures, Desktop, MyComputer, MyDocuments, MyFavorites, MyMusic, MyNetworkPlaces, MyPictures, Printers, ProgramFiles, Recent

Now you're saying what if I don't run WinXP Pro? Well you need to either use TweakUI or edit the registry directly.

Registry location:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER -Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\comdlg32\PlacesBar

String value (name will be Place0 to Place4):
"Place0"="c:\\temp"

The above will only work for the Windows dialogbox and not the Microsoft Dialogbox. The following can be followed to modify these dialogboxes too: Office 2000 | Office XP | Office 2003

...some additional hacks can be found in Veign's Registry Hacks...

Center a page with CSS and NO tables

Just a quick example of how to use CSS to center a webpage without the need for tables.

Now, wasn't that easy...