Over the weekend I worked on a little micro project to help me during web development work. Have you ever needed a dummy image while laying out a site but opening a graphics app, entering the dimensions, saving it out, and uploading said image to your server seemed like too much work? Yea it was a bother for me to.

That’s why I created DummyImage.com which let’s you spit out a filler image at any size you want. All you have to do is construct a URL like so http://dummyimage.com/300×240. Replace the numbers with whatever you want and my script will spit back a GIF image for you.

I have even packaged up the source code so you can download it, run it on your own server, mash it to bits or whatever else you want. Comments, suggestions, improvements are always welcome and hopefully this thing won’t take down my server from all of the image generating on the back end.

Happy Dummy Imaging!

The be all and end all of Bittorrent sites (pre-PiateBay.org that is), SuperNova.org, has been relaunched thanks to the happy Sweedish pirates over at The Pirate Bay. Besides offering yet another site to grab your warez, the members responsible for the reincarnation have a message for the “non-internet loving companies” out there:

This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you. You are the past and the forgotten, we are the internet and the future.

Yarr! Those pirates are bold!

We bloggers always seem to be in a hurry. I always try to include a photo in all of my posts and when I am in a rush, waiting for the slow and bloated Photoshop to open is a real drag. That is why I rely on ImageWell whenever I am posting from my PowerBook. ImageWell features…

• Resize, Rotate, Crop and Flip
• Layering and Transparency controls for images and draw objects
• Web Preview and Quality/Size adjustment tool before uploading to the web
• Screen Grab feature grabs full screen, a selection on your screen, or window grab and automatically imports it into the well for instant editing and sending

I mostly use it to resize and compress larger image to fit on my blog but it provides other features that I may use in the future. The best thing of all is ImageWell is completely free! So if you constantly find yourself waiting for Photoshop to boot up just to make a minor change, consider using ImageWell and get back to your web work.