PHP class useful for generating PDFs from HTML/CSS.

A PHP class for displaying the built in media uploader tools in custom forms

Good reference for creating a class in PHP and extending it and what not.

WordPress source code browser. Good for documentation and reference.

PHP Scripts/WordPress plugin for making your own URL shortener complete with stats.

How to modify WordPress' Gallery HTML shortcode

a very simple chunk of code to auto-link the following parts of a tweet:

* URLs (into direct links)
* hashtags (link to a twitter search for that hashtag)
* usernames (link to that user’s profile page)

Ever since the surge of interest in my pet project dummyimage.com I’ve been meaning to add some new features. Today is the International Day of Awesomeness (which coincides with Chuck Norris’ birthday) and I couldn’t think of a better time to unveil DummyImage.com’s new functionality to the public.

Here is a run down of the changes: Specify Custom Colors You can choose the background and foreground colors of the dummy image right in the url using a 6,3,2, or even 1 character hexcode. Don’t worry if you forget to do this as dummy image will default to gray and black. Add Your Own Text A lot of people wanted to be able to add their own text to a dummy image to better communicate what it is representing. Now using the &text= parameter you can. A Better Typeface Arial be damned! Font geeks cringed at my basic choice of a font. Some seemed worried about my distribution of the most popular font on Earth. Now both camps can be happy as I’m now using the completely free and open M+ Font. I also changed the X in the middle of the images to a multiplication sign × as pointed out by Erinah and Dave Cortright. Standard Image Sizes Dummyimage.com is a useful prototyping tool and a lot of prototypes and wireframes have ad positions. Instead of memorizing dimensions you can now bring up ad sizes by their industry-standard name like largerectangle, skyscraper, and fullbanner. You can even customize the colors, text, and formats of theses sizes as well. Pick Your Format Before you could add any image format extension to the url but my script would still generate a GIF image everytime. Now you can generate proper PNG, JPG, and GIF images and drag them into another app trouble free.

And with these new features I figured it was time to give the site a proper, though still simple, design. Rather than bury how these features work in long, boring text I made a little tool that shows you everything you need to know with minimal fuss. Not a fan of change? Don’t worry, you can still use Dummyimage.com to generate place holder images exactly the same way you have always been doing it. So thank you to everyone who has e-mailed me, tweeted me, left a comment on a post somewhere or otherwise provided feedback on dummyimage.com. I’m glad so many people found it as useful as I think it is. Keep the ideas and dummyimage variations coming. I’m sure this thing could be better. a

Handy functions for scrubbing PHP input clean and sanitizing it.

Lots of interesting Google Code projects related to web design.

Way back in August of 2007 I built a simple PHP tool that generates place-holder images at different size by simply changing the URL. The idea came to me when I was working on a redesign for USNews.com. I hated opening up Photoshop, creating a new document,  filling the background layer, and exporting for web just to make a simple placeholder image. That is why I made dummyimage.com. I figured it would be useful to other people which is why I also released the complete source code, documented and including instructions for setting it up on your own server. But like most new things, few gave it any notice.

The other day my friend Charlie Park (founder of Pear Budget) found it when doing some in-browser wire-framing and sent out a tweet to all of his followers. But he didn’t stop there. Charlie also posted it to Hacker News, a simple news aggregator aimed at geeks. It was obvious that my little tool was resonating with other developers with the tagline “Lorem ipsom for images.” In 24 hours, the Hacker News story got 161 votes with 77 comments, 513 people bookmarked it on del.icio.us, and 337 tweets. What really struck me was how dummyimage.com was crossing the language barrier. I saw tweets mentioning in Spanish, Japanese, Russian, German, Dutch, even Latvian. I’m glad my idea was simple enough that foreign speakers could easily pick it up without any translation help.

All of this sudden attention also produced helpful feedback and new feature ideas. I started working on an update this past December for a few additions I wanted to see but this recent surge of interest has lit a fire under my butt to continue developing. As is the nature of opensource software, people don’t have to wait for me; they can adapt the code to their own needs. Here are some iterations that have already been made:

Fakeimage (Ruby) Placeholder_image (Ruby) Lorem ipsom for Images (JavaScript/jQuery)

And somewhere down the line I would like to give it an attractive homepage. Hooray for side projects! a

PHP script that automates creating HTML/CSS bar charts out of UL or OL elements.

Greatl ist of PHP code snippits

Excellent PHP regex testing tool.

Library for parsing CSV files using PHP.

Nifty number to word translation.

A simple, lightweight CMS aimed at developers. Would be interesting to try some day for a small project.

A simple, no frills CMS for small projects. Suppose to be quick and easy to install.