I used to own cassettes, make them for my friends, and listen to them in my car. Today I discover that the fine people over at says-it.com have produced the Cassette Generator, another in their line of pages that make cool graphics to post on your blog, send to your friends, or whatever.

I found out about this by looking at my Lijit List, the first page I see at lijit.com. Someone in my trust network had reported on it, others had picked it up and when I logged in this morning there it was at the top of the list. Because I trust these people and they trust others I get a filter on web content that I trust. If you like what I like, you to can trust me just click on this Trust Me” button on the sidebar, or for one post only, the cassette tape below.

(When will our children be doing this with CDs?)

When developing in the social world of Web 2.0 you find yourself attatching avatars to users. These avatars not only allow the users to customize how the world sees them, but also to give you a way of identifying users without using text, conserving screen real estate.

After looking at the way that other sites allow you to upload your avatar, I know that I was going to have to do something similar. I thought about rolling my own, but who has the time. A short goole search later and I discovered Dave Spurr at defusion.org.uk had spent the time to create a javascript library built on Prototype and Script.aculo.us that allows you to crop images. He calls it Javascript Cropper UI. It’s very slick and since it builds upon libraries I am already using it was an obvious choice.

Unfortunately, out of the box it didn’t support multiple previews, something I wanted to include, so after a morning of hacking I have added the ability to pass in multiple individually sized preview windows. I also removed the dependecy on minimum widths and heights, as I pass in the size of each preview. You do need to constrain the ratio of your select box and previews equally however or your images will become distorted.
Check out a demo here.

Every blog has a beginning, that post saying, I don’t know what I’m doing, this is ugly and some day it’ll get better, if I remember to keep posting. Well, here goes. I’m giving WordPress a go, it seems neat, lots of people use it. I randomly picked this theme, had to fix the the css to make it look halfway decent in Firefox, but it is what it is. It will get better.

I work for Lijit Networks, Inc now, or just Lijit as we like to call it. I’ve been slicing and dicing html, php, css and images almost constantly for the last month and we’ve got our first beta going. If you want to make your way into the beta, you can do so by click on the Trust me! button on the right. This will take you to the Lijit website and provide a way to add me as your first informer. Over time I will talk more about Lijit, how I use it, what it can do for you, and where it’s going.