Found a nice color tool this morning - it extracts multiple color palettes from any image you upload or from a random image it pulls from Flickr.

I finally got my first Blackberry - a Curve 8320 Titanium. It came in the mail today and I left it in the box because I knew once I got it out that would be the end of work for the day.

I got it for one reason - so I can catch emails while out at meetings. Some days, like last Thursday, I spend 4-5 hours away at client or networking meetings, and being able to quickly respond to an important email is critical sometimes. I figure if it gets me just one additional hour of work per month, it’s earned its keep.

I’m excited to see what it can do…

I found this cool tool today  on IPwalk.com. If you’re a hosting reseller like I am, you can enter the name of your company and it will tell you your market share in the U.S. and the world.

I am currently a major player in the United States with 0.0002% of the total hosting market under my control.

I’ve tried various clunky fixes for the IE6 PNG transparency problem, but yesterday ran across a wonderful little script from Angus Turnbull (from 2005, but no matter).

I tried it yesterday on a CSS background image and it works like a charm, but ran into some problems today trying to use it on a floated image.

Here’s the thing: when using it for a background image, follow the directions under ‘Transparent Backgrounds’ here and it works perfectly. But when you use it for a foreground image, you have to have a blank .gif file on the server, and you have to edit one line in Angus’ .htc file to point to that blank .gif.

This info is not obvious at all and I was really confused until I read Angus’ page thoroughly. But after loading the blank .gif and editing the iepngfix.htc file, all was well.

This is one of the easier implementations of a PNG fix I’ve seen. It uses the ‘behavior’ property in CSS, a Microsoft-proprietary thing and won’t affect browsers that already support PNG’s correctly.

I spent three solid hours today Googling for a plugin that would let me display an RSS feed from another site in a Wordpress page, not in a sidebar widget (I don’t want to use the widget because the names of my RSS feeds are too long, they spill over the header image for the widget and I don’t want to alter those). I found so many potential tools that either didn’t work when I installed them or had a huge list of tasks associated with getting them to work…

I was really getting frustrated but I just found FirstRSS, loaded it up and (lo and behold) it works. No tweaking, no coding, very, very sweet. Exactly what I was looking for.

I found a nice little tool this morning for converting your hourly rate to an annual salary and vice versa.

I’ve been using Plogger for about two and a half years now. This is a fantastic little PHP/MySQL gallery program, free and open source. It takes about five minutes to install and the templates are now fully customizable. It can also easily drop right into an existing site, which is a great feature.

This is a real no-brainer program for clients - getting new images into the DB is as easy as dropping them into an FTP folder, or you can choose single images right from your computer. You can have as many categories and albums as you like. It’s the easiest gallery to use that I’ve found so far and I’ve used it in a number of client sites.

Here’s the gallery from our recent vacation - I put this together in about one hour last night.

I’ve been using a service called MyFax for a couple of years now, and since my account came up for renewal today I was doing some price checking among other services. I decided to stick with MyFax for now, since it’s only $10 per month for sending and receiving, but I did find this nifty tool for Internet fax price comparisons.