Ruhani Rabin - Tech, Life and Interestingness

Best Freeware Digital Photo Organizer software for Windows

Ruhani Rabin — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:56:07 +0000

Digital photo management software is designed for people who want to organize and share personal and family photos, but they don’t want to spend a lot of time editing them. Addition to that helping you browse and sort through your image collection, they also allow you to catalog your media with keywords, descriptions and categories. These tools usually do not offer pixel-level editing capabilities such as Adobe Photoshop or Corel Graphics suite, instead they provide easy, one-click corrections plus printing and photo sharing features. Here are the best free digital photo organizer software at your fingertips.

Picasa from Google

Picasa is a flashy and functional digital photo organizer and editor which has improved considerably since its first release. Picasa is excellent for beginners and casual digital shooters who want to find all their pictures, sort them into albums, do quick edits, and share with friends and family. I especially like the Picasa Web Albums integration which gives you 1024 MB of free space to post your photos online. Best of all, Picasa is free!

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Windows Live Photo Gallery helps you import your photos and videos from digital cameras, camcorders, CDs, DVDs, and Windows Live Spaces. You can browse the pictures on your computer by folder or by date, and you can add keyword tags, ratings and captions for even more organization. Clicking the “Fix” button gives you easy-to-use tools for adjusting exposure, color, detail (sharpness), and for cropping and removing red eye. All edits are saved automatically, but can be reverted at a later time. There is also an automatic panorama stitching tool.

XnView

With XnView you can quickly and easily view, process, organize and convert image files. XnView is able to read more than 500 different formats and then convert them to other formats such as GIF, BMP, JPG, PNG, multi page TIFF. XnView can also display video formats, many digital camera formats and more exotic formats such as Amiga IFF and Calamus.

The Image viewer (Browser) is similar to Windows Explorer. You simply navigate the directory structure as desired and any image files found in a directory are displayed in miniature (Thumbnails). This lets you keep an overview of the images available at the same time as letting you quickly view and select specific images.

XnView also offers more advanced features such as Web page creation, contact prints, multiple conversion (format and transformation), slide shows, screen capturing and Twain support for scanners and digital cameras. The integrated file operations such as copying, moving, creation of directories and files makes XnView the universal tool for graphics.

NOTE: Freeware for private non-commercial, educational use and non-profit organization. It’s designed for more advanced users.

Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition

Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition software makes it easy to find, fix, and share your digital photos. Organize your digital photos in a snap.

Instantly fix photo flaws in just a click or two. And easily share your memories in a slide show with captions, or e-mail individual photos to family and friends.

JetPhoto Studio

A full-featured digital photo organizer and Web publisher. JetPhoto Studio will enable user to organize photos by notes, keywords, time and location. The specified date or time the user took the photos will be highlighted in calendar (Month View or Week View).

Using the calendar, you can log your travel by taking photos or use digital camera to compose your multimedia diary. As another innovative feature, JetPhoto also integrates GPS technology to locate and link photos on geographical map.

JetPhoto Studio provides some utilities to resize pictures and stamp watermarks in batches, generate Flash movie with photo slideshow and crop pictures for your cell phone or PDA screens.

Once the photo album is prepared on a user’s personal Macintosh, only one click is needed to synchronize local album with online web photo album based on JetPhoto Server.

All uploaded pictures will be resized and stamped with watermark automatically while web publishing. JetPhoto Server enables users to quickly build and customize a searchable, full-featured photo web site.

It’s a freeware and you can download this useful application.

PicaJet Free Edition

PicaJet is a simple, yet magnificently equipped and powerful digital photo album exposing a rich set of features and plenty of those “small touches” that provide a really big impact!

There has long been a real need for a photo album application that would be as simple and intuitive as the real-world variety. Observing this, we got right to work on a solution. The result?

PicaJet, a Digital Photo Album application that’s as straightforward and simple to use as the one on your bookshelf, but outfitted with all the features you’d expect from digital technology!

PicaJet is a software that enhances, prints, finds and share your digital photos.

PicaJet enables you to import your photos quickly and easily from your digital camera, scanner or image files, and then manage, view, enhance, print and share a lifetime of precious memories.

So here they are, I’ve personally used all of them but Picasa and XnView stands out in the crowd. Where Picasa is well known for simplicity and XnView is well known as a Swiss army knife of image operations. JetPhoto Studio is also a very promising application to look into. Those who are using Vista most probably already seen Windows Live Photo Gallery on their system.

So what are you using? Do you know of another cool digital photo organizer application that should be listed here. You can find me on twitter @ruhanirabin if you want to let me know about your opinion. Don’t forget to share your comments. Alternatively you can simply stay updated via my RSS Feed too.

Random Posts

5 Cool Photo Sharing alternatives for Twitter

Ruhani Rabin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:07:01 +0000

TwitPic is currently the most popular and largest image sharing service for Twitter. Due to its popularity, there are also popular twitter clients that have built-in support for TwitPic. Now what if we need something alternative than TwitPic? There are some applications that worth a try?Here I’m talking about the possible TwitPic photo sharing application alternatives that counts.

Pikchur

Pikchur is a simple service that updates your social networks / micro-blogging platforms with pictures! No need to signup! Just login with one of our many supported platforms and start sending your Piks today!

Features:

Social posting to multiple social networks such as twitter, facebook, tumblr, friendfeed and many others at the same time
Private posting options
Pikboxes or categories
Geotag photos
Supported by Seesmic Desktop Client

Pikchur Website

TweetPhoto

TweetPhoto seems to be the true rival of TwitPic, it offers a number of advanced options, such as stats, geo-tagging, favoriting and many more.

Features:

Upload photos via mobile phone and the web to TweetPhoto
Share through Twitter and Facebook
Favorite the photos you like
See who views your photos; favorites your photos, comments on your photos
Track how many people looked at a photo
Automatically geo-tag photos sent from a GPS enabled phone
Use an integrated URL shortening service, http://pic.gd
Filter photos by Twitter or Facebook friends
Self-moderate comments
Search tagged photos throughout the site
Subscribe to RSS feeds by user or tags

TweetPhoto Website

yFrog

yFrog comes from the owners behind well know photo hosting service ImageShack and it is very simple to use. Upload, log in with your Twitter account, share and that’s it. Simple and fast. yFrog is also supported by The most popular Twitter desktop client TweetDeck and Seesmic.

yFrog Website

Pic.im

pic.im is a new and cool service from tr.im for sharing images within services like Twitter. Like tr.im, pic.im collects and then presents cool graphical reports for your shared images, such as how many times they were visited, from which locations, and referred by which websites. With pic.im you know exactly how many people clicked to see your images, and from where.

If you share images on Twitter, pic.im is not only the best name, it is one of the shortest. And because it is 100% integrated with tr.im, if you have an account at tr.im, you already have a pic.im account, and vice-versa. You can combine all your URL sharing needs in one place.

Pic.im Website

Twitgoo

Twitgoo is another simple photo sharing tool. You login with your Twitter login, the interface mimics pretty much of Twitter web interface, except that you can attach photos to your tweets. This is also supported by Seesmic Desktop Client

Twitgoo Website

Personally I love the concept of Pikchur and TweetPhoto. What’s your take? Do you know other cool and useful TwitPic alternative photo sharing tool? Let me know, I will update the list accordingly. You can find me on twitter @ruhanirabin if you want to let me know of any alternatives too. Don’t forget to share your comments.

Alternative free useful PHP Forums and Discussion Boards

Ruhani Rabin — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:29:13 +0000

What is a forum? Early Internet forums could be described as a web version of a newsgroup or electronic mailing list (many of which were commonly called Usenet) ; allowing people to post messages and comment on other messages. Later developments emulated the different newsgroups or individual lists, providing more than one forum, dedicated to a particular topic.

Forums perform a function similar to that of dial-up bulletin board systems and Usenet networks that were common from the late 1970s to the 1990s. Early web-based forums date back as far as 1996. A sense of virtual community often develops around forums that have regular users. Technology, computer games and/or video games, sports, music, fashion, religion, and politics are popular areas for forum themes, but there are forums for a huge number of topics. Internet slang and image macros popular across the Internet are abundant and widely used in Internet forums.

Few of the Most popular PHP driven forums are PHPBB, Invision Board and VBulletin. But today I’m not here to talk about those popular packages; I’m here to list out the possible alternative quality PHP forums available around the globe.

bbPress

bbPress is forum software with a twist from the creators of WordPress.

Have you ever been frustrated with forum or bulletin board software that was slow, bloated and always got your server hacked?

bbPress is focused on web standards, ease of use, ease of integration, and speed. We’re keeping things as small and light as possible while still allowing for great add on features through our extensive plugin system.

What does all that mean? bbPress is lean, mean and ready to take on any job you throw at it.

Download | Extend | Forum | Examples | Documentation

Simple Machines Forum (SMF)

Simple Machines Forum — SMF in short — is a free, professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes.

Its powerful custom made template engine puts you in full control of the lay-out of your message board and with our unique SSI - or Server Side Includes - function you can let your forum and your website interact with each other.

SMF is written in the popular language PHP and uses a MySQL database. It is designed to provide you with all the features you need from a bulletin board while having an absolute minimal impact on the resources of the server. SMF is the next generation of forum software - and best of all it is and will always remain completely free!

Download | Demo | Documents | Customize

Phorum

Started in 1998, Phorum was the original PHP and MySQL based Open Source forum software. Phorum’s developers pride themselves on creating message board software that is designed to meet different needs of different web sites while not sacrificing performance or features.

Download | Demo | Community | Docs

The Ultimate PHP Board (MyUPB)

Your ultimate and free bulletin board resource. MyUPB is a flat file bulletin board powered by TextDB engine so it doesn’t require MySQL Database to run.

Download | Demo | Community | Docs

W-Agora Board

w-agora is Opens In a New Window open source software, you can download, install and even freely modify the code, all free of charge

Versatile: w-agora is one of the most customizable forum packages. Designed to be adapted to various needs, w-agora offers an evolutive solution that will meet various needs

Easy: to install and easy to use: All you need is a simple WEB browser and 5 spare minutes in order to install. The whole interface can be edited with a simple WEB browser

Full featured: w-agora has all the features that you expect from a today’s professional forum software: full WEB based administration, users management, authentication, Online registration, email subscription and much more

Reliable : For more than 5 years, w-agora has been used by a wide and continuously increasing number of sites in France and all over the world.

Download | Docs | Demo

XMB Forum

XMB is a lightweight PHP forum software with all the features you need to support a growing community. With outstanding community support and contribution, you will find XMB to be easy to setup, customize, and enhance.

Though XMB is lightweight out of the box, it offers the key features you need to get your message board up and running

Forum Organization with Categories, Forums & Sub-Forums
Easy to use Member Management
Anti-spam image verification for registration and anonymous posting
U2U Private Messaging
Inline Mass Moderation
Easy-to-use Theming Interface
Board Rules & FAQ System

Download| Mods | Themes | Docs | Demo

PunBB

PunBB is a fast and lightweight PHP-powered discussion board. It is released under the GNU General Public License. Its primary goals are to be faster, smaller and less graphically intensive as compared to other discussion boards. PunBB has fewer features than many other discussion boards, but is generally faster and outputs smaller, semantically correct XHTML-compliant pages. PunBB is written in PHP and thus requires the PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. PunBB also requires a database in which all forum data is stored. For that purpose PunBB supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite.

Developing software to “please the masses” isn’t difficult. Just cram in every possible feature you can think of and most people will love it. Some people, however, will hate it and look for alternatives. The problem with developing for that other group of people is having to make decisions on whether to implement a feature or not. What is a “must-have” and what is not?

Some features that I have so far chosen not to implement are: private messaging, file attachments, polls, linking to off-site avatars, advanced text formatting controls, subforums etc etc. The jury is still out on some of these features, but don’t expect them to pop up anytime soon. It should however be noted that most, if not all of these features have been realized in the form of third-party mods.

Download | Demo | Docs | Extensions

miniBB

miniBB is a software for building Your own forum, but not from “yet another” series. It’s designed with purpose to make a unique forum, which will be different from others by many aspects. It’s the first forum software of choice, which makes possible to save on hosting expenses, computer resources, forum moderation time, and visibly increase forum traffic speed, still running a fully functional script. The secret is that You choose and decide on every option and function available for Your forum. You is the key to your forum success, and miniBB tries to bring up your hidden abilities in this aspect, providing an ultra-optimized handmade programming code and carefully thought interfaces.

Features | Download | Manual | Demo | Community

freeForum

Not everyone needs a full featured bulletin board such as phpBB. freeForum is a GPL, free, and simple discussion board script which can be fully integrated with your existing page layout. It concentrates on the main features of typical forum scripts, and does it well. Above all, you’ll need less than 3 minutes to get it working!

Freedom

Post: you are free to post in open categories.
Categories: unlimited number of categories.
Layout: layout is fully template and css based, feel free to change it.
Cost: as in beer, it’s licensed under the GPL.

Simple

No image, no avatar, no smilies.
No useless statistics.
CSS and template based.

Administration

Backup and restore functions.
Anti-spam: captcha images, smart forms, IP banning, flood protection.
Open and closed categories.
Reserved user names.
Edit previous posts.

Download| Usage | Community

MyBB

MyBB is a discussion board that has been around for a while; it has evolved from other bulletin boards into the forum package it is today. Therefore, it is a professional and efficient discussion board, developed by an active team of developers. The MyBB history has been recorded and is available for the interested to read. You can also read more about the MyBB team and why they develop MyBB in their spare time. We also like to highlight the most active and contributing fansites of the MyBB community.

Security
MyBB puts your board’s security first. Extensive measures have been put in place to guarantee MyBB’s security on your web server. We’ve performed security audits and rewritten code to make sure that no vulnerabilities are left unpatched in MyBB. In the off chance that a vulnerability is found, you can be confident that we’re already preparing a patch for immediate release.

Speed
So fast you’ll have to chase it. MyBB has been optimized to be speedy on any occasion; be it a large or small forum. Whenever we make a change to the core workings of MyBB, we first ensure that it will not cause a disturbance in the speed of your board. Several features have been rewritten to be optimized for larger boards while still working on smaller boards. Regardless of whether your forum is big or small, you can be guaranteed MyBB will provide you with the speed you need to get your forum running.

AJAX
MyBB makes use of AJAX to enhance its features. MyBB uses AJAX technology throughout to make its features quicker and easier to use. In MyBB 1.2, inline editing was added to allow for faster editing of posts from the thread page and thread titles from the forum page, and keeps you from having to load an entire page to make one small edit. In addition, auto completion was added to private messages to make finding the user you want to write to easier. MyBB 1.4 added still more AJAX-based features, such as an updated quick reply, the ability to mark a forum as read, an updated buddy/ignore list manager, an updated thread rating system, and the ability to select PM recipients from your buddy list. Even the Admin CP utilizes some AJAX, such as in the settings search and the theme manager. In all of its uses, AJAX refines the user interface and makes MyBB even easier to use.

Inline Moderation
MyBB’s inline moderation makes management easier. Inline moderation can be found throughout MyBB’s forum and thread pages to make mass moderation a breeze. Inline moderation allows you to perform the same moderation task on multiple threads or posts, or just one. You can even create your own moderation tools using MyBB’s custom mod tools. Inline moderation is just the beginning of the extensive moderation systems you’ll find in MyBB.

Permissions
Extensive permissions allow for complete control. MyBB features a vast set of tools for thorough control of your users’ access to various parts of the board. Every user group has a large set of permissions for various features in the board, as well as varying permissions to each forum. With MyBB, you can control every level of user with ease, and can easily block access to any part of your board to some groups, while leaving it available for others.

Download | Wiki | Mods | Community

ImperialBB

ImperialBB is a free PHP/MySQL driven forum software package which is fully featured and highly customizable. It is compatible with all webserver / operating system setups providing PHP 4.x or higher is installed. It also benefits from a unique one click upgrader and mod installer to cut down the time you have to spend installing mods on your system and ensures that you keep it up to date.

Our forum software package allows you to quickly and easily create categories, forums and sub-forums, manage users / ranks / usergroups / smilies on your community through the powerful administration panel.

Download | Mods | Styles | Community | Blog

Electron AEF

The full name of AEF is Advanced Electron Forum. This bulletin board software is free software. It is written in PHP and MySQL. AEF has a very simple and easy to use Administration Panel and installing this software is a piece of cake! You can install new themes, customize themes the way you want. The User Control Panel has a simple yet beautiful interface where users can set their preferences for the board.

This Bulletin board or forum software has all the general features that a forum software should have. It also includes features such as :

UTF-8 Supported
Search Engine Optimization Tools
IP Ban
W3C Validated
News System with articles
ShoutBox
Threaded Mode for topics
JS DOCK for easy navigation(A first from AEF)
WYSIWYG Editors
Customizable Themes
Multiple Languages supported
Time Zone Adjustment
Automatic Updates
Export Files and Database
Suggest Framework for usernames while writing PM’s
Domdrag for reordering Categories, Forums, emoticons (A new feature included for the first time ever in a forum software.)

Download| Docs | Themes | Community

GBX

Gravity Board X is free forum software written in PHP and MySQL. GBX features a unique front page layout, and version 2.0 will push the envelope with features such as a CSS-based layout, WYSIWYG message editor and AJAX framework.

Download | Docs | Demo

fuzzyLime Forum

Want a forum on your site, but don’t want to have to spend ages setting it up - and want it to look different from all those other ones?

fuzzylime (forum) is for you. We’ve ignored the traditional look of a forum and gone for something altogether more modern. It looks - and works - like your favorite e-mail program. New messages even appear while you’re surfing!

It uses all sorts of clever technology to do this - but don’t worry, we’ve made sure that if your visitors can’t use this for some reason, they can still see everything on your site through a traditional forum-style layout.

For the more technically minded, the script is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database to store posts, user info etc. It also relies heavily on JavaScript, particularly Ajax, to update pages automatically and provide some of the cool effects like the option of dragging boxes around the page.

But as long as your server as PHP and MySQL installed (and most of them do), you should be able to get things up and running within minutes. Then, it’s easy to customize your forum with your own logo (if you wish) as well as choosing from a whole range of color schemes that are built-in to make sure your forum suits the look of the rest of your site.

Download | Screenshots | Forums

These are few of the alternatives to popular forum software like PHPBB or Invision Board. There are many out there but some of these are pretty much faster than the popular ones used by everyone. Do you know of any other useful PHP Forums that you’ve used. Feel free to comment about it. Share your thoughts if you had any problems or drawbacks of these products. You can find me on twitter @ruhanirabin if you want to let me know of any other scripts too.

Free Useful PHP Form Processor Scripts

Ruhani Rabin — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:11:41 +0000

Forms are one of the most common features for almost any website. It provides a secure communication or feedback from the end user to the sites owner. Having said that, forms often allows security breaches to a website so it is advisable to use secured forms processing systems. I hope that this post will help you out searching for PHP based form processors.

PHP Contact Form

Spam protection: users are required to enter security code (captcha).
The script checks that all form fields are filled and that e-mail address has correct form.

Information and Download

Secure PHP Mail Form

Free PHP Mail Form is a single-page multi-use PHP mail (e-mail) website form that allows your users to send you feedback directly from your website, without the need to customize heavily detailed scripts and panic over security.

Features:

Meta header and JavaScript injection protection
Tags stripped and whitespace trimmed
Validity and length checking on name and e-mail fields
IP and browser details included in e-mail
Valid data displayed when other errors occur
Spam word check
Common spam bot blocking
New in v2: Bayesian style spam filtering

Usage Instructions and Download

Form Tools

Form Tools is written for web developers who work on online registration sites, or sites that require any form of information gathering from their online visitors. Put simply, it is a form processor, storage and data access script written in PHP and MySQL, designed to work with any existing web form. With a few minor changes to your form, you can stop using old-fashioned form-mail scripts and instead store form submissions in a database, instantly providing your clients with a user-friendly interface to manage their form submissions, include options such as mass data export via excel, printer-friendly pages, data sorting, form submission editing and optional email notifications.

Demo | Download | Documentation | Translations

phpFormGenerator Beta

phpFormGenerator is a an easy, online tool for creating reliable, efficient, and aesthetically pleasing web forms in a snap. No programming of any sort is required: phpFormGenerator generates the HTML code, the form processor code (PHP), and the field validation code automatically via an easy, point-and-click interface.

phpFormGenerator provides several delivery formats. You can choose to have your form results delivered via email, sent to a MySQL database, and written to a data file (which you can then open in Excel and other programs)

features in phpFormGenerator 3.0:

Simple, intuitive, point-and-click interface
Forms can have multiple pages
Add and remove fields dynamically - without switching pages
Customize look and feel of your form
Add pre-populated fields: country, state (U.S.)
Add non-invasive tooltips to help your users
Add and remove fields dynamically - on the same page
New fields with live validation: date (with pop-up calendar), email
Add pre-populated fields: country, state (U.S.)

Start building

Tectite FormMail

FormMail provides the logic required to accept form submissions on your website and email the results to you (and do other things too!).

Features:

send you their results by email (supports any number of email recipients)
store their results in a CSV (comma separated values) database on your server
create a log file entry of activity on your server
use obfuscated email addresses to prevent SpamBots from harvesting your email addresses
accept no spam; FormMail blocks spam through automatic attack detection tests as well as optional image verification (CAPTCHA) features. Tectite’s form processor is a complete anti-spam solution.
encrypt their results before they are emailed to you (ideal for securely collecting credit card data)
redirect to a specific URL on success (e.g. allow a user to download software after filling in a form)
redirect to a specific URL on failure (customized error page)
alert you of failures
work as simple email gateways - just create a form with one non-special field (usually a textarea field) and formmail.php will format the email appropriately
use GET or POST methods for form submission
send HTML emails formatted with your form results
upload files
perform advanced field validations
perform advanced error handling
send an autoresponse to the person submitting your form
support for other human languages (internationalization)
GeoIP support

Download | Documentation | Instructions | FAQ | How to Guides

Ajax Form Builder

It is a PHP & Mysql Based WYSWYG Form Builder powered by Jquery . It makes you create a ready-to-go Online Contact Us From, Online Quiz/Survey, Customer Satisfaction Survey, Job Application, Bug Tracker … in minutes, just move/click your mouse to build incredible online forms without any knowledge of programming.

Download | Instructions

MailCode

Mailcode is a simple feedback form system, designed with the novice web designer in mind. It utilizes CAPTCHA technology to prevent spam submission, validates email address structure, and validates form fields to ensure all requested information is provided.

Mailcode is expandable, allowing you to include your own form fields without editing the complicated source code. Simply add your fields to the basic HTML form and the mail handler will interpret them. Edit the HTML form to match your website layout.

To start using the system, simply upload and configure the script, and add one line of code to your webpage.

Information and Download

Silentum FormSend

Silentum FormSend is a basic PHP mailing script which is great to use as either a “Contact Us” page, or as a feedback system for your site. Unlike a lot of other forms, this one is sent through a single PHP file. It uses a simple form to send user comments to a specified email address, and can be easily set up in a matter of minutes. It logs the IP addresses the messages are sent from to prevent abuse, and has settings as to which of the four fields to require and which to leave optional.

Information and Download

FormHandler

FormHandler is a PHP written “module” which allows you to create dynamic forms in an easy way. So easy that you can build a fully working form, including field validations, within 10 lines!

With FormHandler you can:

Very easy to generate a form
Easy to save/edit data from a database
Easy to validate the values
You can use templates!
The form is generated by the XHTML 1.0 standard
Possibility to change to style of the form
Possibility to add CSS / Javascript to the fields
The size FormHandler is only +/- 256 kb (server side)! (without the FCKeditor files)
There can be generated special fields (like datefields)
It’s very easy to upload files
Possibility to generate an online text editor!
It’s completely FREE!

Download | Manual

PHP FormMail Generator

PHP FormMail Generator - A tool to create ready-to-use web forms in a minutes. It’s Easy + Quick + Free

Features:

Unlimited standard form fields, credit card and file upload fields
User input validation (checking required fields, credit card number and expiry date, file upload, etc..)
Send customized email to you, support attachments
Send personalized auto response email or copy to user
Save submitted form data as Excel file
Customized thank you message or redirect page
Anti email spider (Email address harvesting)
Anti-Spam using security image (CAPTCHA) and email header injection removal
Log all email traffics (to see if there are any spam activities)
Admin Panel to see and download your form data

Start Generating

CJ Web2Mail

The CJ Web2Mail is a very simple web page form to your email inbox script. The script has been improved considerably from the previous version.

V3.0 includes multipart email sending which basically means that the script sends both HTML and text emails to you (and for the auto responder). This way the receiver of the email can leave it up to their mail client to choose which one to display: Outlook Express for example, uses HTML (but you can have this turned off, therefore sending both makes sure you get it). The script comes with full data validation and a thank you page which can be customized fully.

Download | Demo | Information

FormContact

The FormContact 1.1 system will allow you to handle most Form-To-Email functions required by a website. It can be set up to take all the submitted form data and convert it to a readable email format. It can be customized to send users to a “thank you” page once the form data has been filled out, and certain form fields can be marked as being required in order for the form to be completed.

It also has the added ability for sending an automated response to the person who fills out the form. Different responses can be used for different forms, and can even be personalized to the user, based on form fields they enter.

Information and Download

TheWebHelp PHP Contact Form

If you use a normal contact form then spammers will find a way to automatically send junk messages through that form, so you need a way to verify that the sender is an actual person and not an automated script.

A good solution for this is to use an random code that is generated by a script the code will be displayed as an image so only a person could read the image and type the number. This practice is called Captcha image validation. The image also has a noise added to avoid any existent automated scripts that could read the text from the image.

The contact form also makes sure the user filled all the form fields correctly, when all fields are completed and the text entered inside email box is an email address.

Usage Instructions and Download

KillBot Form

This script is intended to eliminate various types of web based robots from repeatedly filling out forms by requiring the visitor to enter some simple data (called a Turing or CAPTCHA test). Many times you may have a form (feedback, poll, guestbook, etc.) on your web site and a malicious user targets a script to automatically fill out your form until it either cripples your server, skews statistics, or floods your inbox. By requiring the visitor to read the text in an image (over 900,000,000 possible combinations) and enter that with the other data in your form, you can prevent automated scripts from repeatedly filling out your form.

Please test out the sample form below for yourself and see! If you find the image too difficult to read, simply click on the image to reload the page for a new one. KillBot can be set to be case-sensitive or case-insensitive, or it can be set to display only uppercase or only lowercase.

Download and Instructions

SiteMail 2.0

Sitemail 2.0 Simple PHP based web contact form. Includes a theme for use as a stand-alone script or can be included into your own pages. Also uses error checking for blank fields or an incorrectly formatted email address.

Download

Simple PHP Form Mailer

Simple PHP Form Mailer attempts to be easy to administer, and secure, while at the same time being some what Formmailer compatible enough to not upset existing users. Thus, the outside has a Formmailer-ish flavor, but the inside is completely different.

Download and Information

There are many more form processors for PHP available for free but these are the one easy to use and implement and some of them provides robust features. Do you have a PHP form processor script that you’ve used and useful? Feel free to post it in the comments. You can find me on twitter @ruhanirabin if you want to let me know of any other scripts too. Don’t forget to share your comments.

Elegant Useful and Free PHP Graph/Chart Libraries

Ruhani Rabin — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:35:13 +0000

For various kind of reports/applications graph and charts can play a very important role. Here are some of the free and open source chart libraries that you can use into your own PHP web projects. Use these to enhance the user experience and build a rich client presentation.

So here we are, get these elegant and useful chart libraries and add more rich chart on your PHP web application easily.

Do you know another elegant chart library? Post a comment with it, I will append that in this list afterwards. Share your own thoughts at the comments or you can find me at twitter @ruhanirabin, say hi or share your opinion.

Foller.me know more about your twitter followers

Ruhani Rabin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:17:30 +0000

Twitter is huge and everyday it’s becoming more popular in the crowd. Everyday from a geek to a carpenter uses twitter in many different ways to enhance knowledge, relationship and reaching a mass audience which eventually brings passive business. Today I am introducing another twitter tool called Foller.me.Foller.me is a creative and research initiative by one of my great twitter contact @kovshenin. Today is the live date of this product. So lets take a look at his startup.

So basically what does Foller.me do? In simple words it lets you know more detailed useful information about your followers. It’s a pretty short version of analytics of a twitter user to understand them and the tweets they mostly talk about, who mostly they connect to. Foller.me is a third-party Twitter service that renders instant detailed information about a particular Twitter user’s latest 200 posts. It would generally take hours of scouting and pulling together information from hundreds of posts to scrape up some sort of insight into the user’s topic interests on Twitter. Foller.me does this in a flash, providing 3 tag clouds which represent the user’s key topics on Twitter.

How does it work? Foller.me gets access to the profile of a user via the Twitter API, scanning all the public info and his/her latest 200 tweets. It builds up three tag clouds: topics, #hashtags and @mentions, based on the user’s recent activity, excluding all stop words.

You enter your desired username you want to know about and press enter

Foller.me will look up the user profile via twitter API in a blaze and bring out the
details, such as the users recent topics

Addition to that it will also scan and bring out recently used #hashtags, mentions
of other users (from RT and conversations)

For example let’s say you’ve received 25 new followers today and you cannot decide whether to follow back or not. You do NOT have the time to read 200 tweets on each of them, correct? Nevertheless, you can’t just follow everyone, since you’ll get unwanted tweets in your friends timeline. Here comes Foller.me into the picture: Just take a peek at his Foller.me profile and you’re done!

Best of all you don’t need to put your username and password OR you don’t have to signup. So why don’t you give it a shot and share your thoughts about it. Found a little bit more about the service. Don’t forget to check out the authors announcement too, that might be the place you want to give your response. It’s still early beta and there are much room for improvement, my thoughts would be Twitter OAuth integration.

Best Adobe AIR Twitter Desktop Clients

Ruhani Rabin — Mon, 11 May 2009 15:00:07 +0000

Twitter is become the most popular micro-blogging platform now a days and yes many of us preferred different kind of twitter clients. Some prefers desktop based twitter applications specific to Windows, Linux or MAC and some of us prefers web based twitter applications. Those are mostly platform specific twitter desktop clients, so they depends on target operating systems. Then came Adobe AIR platform, provides a common ground for most popular operating systems to build rich desktop clients, they act similar on multiple operating systems with common interface. Now there are a variety of Adobe AIR platform based Twitter Desktop Clients, lets take a look at the most useful ones. Bare in mind these Twitter Desktop clients requires Adobe AIR framework to be installed in your system before they can start working. Lets take a look at them..

TweetDeck

Designed for : Windows XP/Vista/MAC OS/Linux

What is TweetDeck?

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in public beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.

How does it do that?

TweetDeck enables users to split their main feed (All Tweets) into topic or group specific columns allowing a broader overview of tweets. To do this All Tweets are saved to a local database. The far left column will always contain All Tweets. The GROUP, SEARCH and REPLIES buttons then allow the user to make up additional columns populated from the database. Once created these additional columns will automatically update allowing the user to keep track of a twitter threads far easier. Being database driven TweetDeck allows the user to continue twittering even when offline. Tweets and direct messages are queued and then sent automatically when back online. This offline functionality also applies if Twitter is down. [UPDATE 07/07/2008 - this functionality has been temporarily suspended due to a small period when duplicate queued tweets were sent out. This functionality will be reinstated when a more robust solution has been put in place. I do not anticipate this being very long]

Additional Features

- Catch up with overnight global twitterings as TweetDeck stores all updates whilst running
- Continual status updates of TweetDeck and Twitter
- Resize TweetDeck as either an unobtrusive column, full screen or anything in between
- Especially useful running full screen on a separate monitor
- Filter tweets up to 48 hours using the Timeframe bar
- Auto updates from the Twitter API

Website and Download

Seesmic Desktop

Designed for : Windows XP/Vista/MAC OS

What is Seesmic Desktop?

TweetDeck alike features include the capability to monitor multiple feeds side-by-side in a similar fashion, create custom user lists, and post from multiple accounts while the application keeps track of which ones are which to keep duplicates at bay. You can also drag and drop photos from your computer to post straight to Twitter. Currently Seesmic Desktop is the only Rival for the most popular TweetDeck application. The preview release has its perks. A lot of feature should be included such as hashtag dropdown and translation services etc. But so far it’s a promising application

Seesmic Tutorial:

Key Features

- Derived from Twhirl
- Multiple twitter accounts integration
- Facebook integration
- Retweet format customization
- User lists similar to TweetDeck
- Saved searches
- TwitPic integration
- Shorturl services

Website and Download

Twhirl

Designed for : Windows XP/Vista/MAC OS

twhirl is a social software desktop client, based on the Adobe AIR platform.

Some of twhirl’s features:

runs on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX
connects to multiple Twitter, identi.ca, Friendfeed and seesmic accounts
notifications on new messages
shorten long URLs (using snurl, twurl or is.gd)
cross-post twitter updates to Pownce and Jaiku
post images to TwitPic
search tweets using Twitter Search and TweetScan
timeline filtering
localized to English, German, Italian and Spanish
color schemes
automatically check for new versions

Website and Download

TweetR

Designed for : Windows XP/Vista/MAC OS

Send files to your friends, but just dragging any file on to Tweetr. Tweetr will automatically upload your file and when it is done will provide a short url to send to your friends (please do not upload copyrighted material). Use the webcam feature to show off you latest toys, bruise, haircut. To use the webcam click on the camera icon (if you have a web camera installed and you only see a white box, click the “select camera” link and choose a different camera from the drop down that appears).

Website and Download

Spaz

Designed for : Windows XP/Vista/MAC OS/Linux

Spaz is a Twitter client for users who value free, open-source software, attractive design, and customizability.

Features:

Cross-platform: available on all AIR-compatible platforms: Windows, OS X, and Linux
Open source software using a New BSD-style license (source available at Spaz Google Code project site)
Written in pure Javascript, XHTML and CSS. Utilizes the powerful jQuery Javascript framework
Built-in global search powered by Summize
Short URL creation tool with support for multiple services (is.gd, bit.ly, snurl.com, and more)
In-line short URL decoding
No ads
Markdown syntax support
Multiple themes and support for user-created themes
User-defined CSS overrides
Event sounds using the Tokyo Train Station soundset by Dominik Dimaano
Directory listings of users you’re following, and your followers.
Debugging and development tools and debug logging

Website and Download

** Update **

DestroyTweeter - It’s a nifty handy tool (Never Mind the name cause its just the opposite)

DestroyTwitter is a robust but compact Twitter application built to run on Mac, Windows, and Linux using Adobe AIR. It consists of a series of canvases that constantly update to keep tweets current and up-to-date using notifications that appear immediately after a new tweet arrives. DestroyTwitter also features complete direct messaging functionality. Messages and tweets can be replied to with the original visible for quick and easy reference. A search function is also available to track anything that’s being talked about.

Where to get it?
Download the latest release from here.

Well these are the some of best Twitter Clients based on Adobe AIR platform. Feel free to install and test out according to your taste. And yes don’t hesitate to share your opinion about them too. If you prefer to have a look at all the Twitter based applications and tools, have a look at the wiki listing of twitter apps and services. If you are interested you can have a look at Digsby which combines all your popular Instant Messenagers, Facebook, Myspace, Multiple Email Ticker and Twitter.

How-to Remove Mikeyy Worm from Twitter Profile

Ruhani Rabin — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 09:31:43 +0000

Mikeyy is variant of an internet worm spreading through the Twitter stream disguise itself under a short url, which looks legitimate but it’s not. It hijacks the twitter user account who clicked on the disguised link.

What it does?

It takes over your twitter account and spread messages using your username
Changes links and profile information
It spreads messages like “Twitter, freaking fix this already. >:[ - Mikeyy" and "This worm is getting out of hand Twitter. - Mikeyy"

How to remove it?

First of all close down your desktop applications like Twhirl and any other.
Turn off javascript from your browser or get the firefox extension NOScript, it disables any javascripts by default.
Now load your browser and edit your twitter profile, delete of anything that you didn't put there.
Reset your password as soon as you can.
If your account is locked you can always ask twitter for a reset password option here
Now some additional option for the users of TweetDeck 0.25, this version of TweetDeck allows you to see a short url preview before launching it. Enable that option first in settings

Enable the option in settings page

Sample preview of a short url

Additionally:

Check your system with a virus checker such as Kaspersky antivirus or SpyBot Search and destroy.
Stop going to visit the Web Profile of any twitter user for the moment until it's completely sorted out.
Use TweetDeck for safety as described above.
Regularly keep eyes on the Trends listed at http://search.twitter.com and additionally you might find the solution over there too.

As you can see from the first Image of this post a lot of people is being infected and exploited. Even though twitter uses pretty little personal information but this kind of security holes can bring panic to the entire network. If you follow the steps above, you should be out of the panic zone in no time.

10 Useful free CSS tools and services

Ruhani Rabin — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 18:20:44 +0000

CSS allows a website owner to build their HTML in a nice, logical order. Mostly when using tables to layout a website, the HTML that powers the website is not laid out in a proper order (also known as the ‘code flow’). Now here are some tools and web services I’ve use in a day to day basis to shorten and speed up the development time that might come handy for you. These tools aid you to write better and tested codes in less time.

#1 Sky CSS Tool

Sky CSS Tool allows you to create CSS classes almost without using manuscript code but you will need a JavaScript compatible browser for the proper functioning.

#2 CSS Builder

This web based program’s intention is to easily generate styles for CSS selectors on the fly. Simply fill in the data below, click build, and copy the code into your stylesheets.

#3 CSS Code Beautifier

Use CSS Code Beautifier to Format and Compress your CSS codes. It provides an array of different option sets to satisfy your needs.

#4 Free CSS Toolbox (Windows Freeware)

Free CSS Toolbox includes a number of tools for fast-tracking and enhancing the development of style sheet code, such as an advanced CSS Formatter and CSS Validator.

If you develop websites that use CSS, the Free CSS Toolbox can help you save time and increase productivity without any cost.

Key Features:-

Simple CSS editor:- Quickly create and modify CSS code - Auto-complete and syntax highlighting makes CSS editing easy.
CSS Formatter / Beautifier:- Easily re-format any CSS code - Quickly adjust somebody’s else CSS to fit your style - Make your code pretty and easy to read.
CSS Checker / Validator:- Find and correct errors in your code - Check your CSS against various specifications - See if your CSS is compatible with older web browsers.
CSS Compressor:- Reduce the size of your CSS code by up to 70% - Make your web pages load faster.
Integration with W3C CSS Validator - Quickly validate your CSS code with the web-based W3C CSS Validator

Download (Windows XP/2003/Vista)

#5 CSS Drive CSS Compressor

Compress and optimize your CSS codes using the CSS Drive’s CSS Compressor

#6 CSS Menu and Tab Creator

Create CSS menus and Tabs using this single and simple web based interface.

#7 Form Style Generator

Design your form and customize your style using form style generator. You can have a real time preview.

#8 CSS Round

Cssround creates a text page with round corner in 10 seconds.You can define your own options :
Corner radius value, Round color, Background color, Text color and size of round content you want.
After Generating it, you will get all the 4 corners pictures, the html and css code into a ZIP file.
It is a very easy way to integrate cool design to your website quickly. Another alternative tool similar to this is CornerShop.

#9 CSS Tab Designer (Windows Freeware)

CSS Tab Designer is a unique and easy to use software to help you design css-based lists and tabs visually and without any programming knowledge required..

#10 Listamatic

Can you take a simple list and use different Cascading Style Sheets to create radically different list options? The Listamatic shows the power of CSS when applied to one simple list

Even More CSS Tools to look at

CSS Font and Text Style Wizard - experiment with font and text styles and generate sample CSS style source code.
CSS Form Code Maker - Generates ‘Colorful Box Layout’ For Forms
CSS Creator - Live CSS Layout generator for your web site
Firdamatic - is an online tableless layout generator that allows you to create and customize layouts easily

Do you use a tool which is not listed here? Feel free to suggest using the comments box below.

Top 10 Most useful Web Developers tools for Firefox

Ruhani Rabin — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:01:11 +0000

Firefox is always been the favorite choice for the developers for debugging and developing web applications. The extension architecture allows anyone to add powerful add-on to the browser for robust enhancement on many different development needs. I use Firefox everyday like I need to take my lunch and dinner. So here are the most useful Firefox extensions I use that I want to share with everyone. I have to admit, many of these extensions won’t come as a eye opener to developers those who are already so deep with Firefox extensions, but hopefully there will be some you’ve yet to know about.

#1 Web Developer Tools for Firefox

Web Developer should be your first of many extensions, largely because it is many extensions in one, it has terrific tools like image and form debugging, HTML and CSS validation, windows resizing, and many more. If your Web site has a mixed types of source code, this extension easily locates CSS, Javascript, and so on. Once you’ve finished playing with the code into your editor, you can validate the code directly via W3C to ensure that the code is clean and under W3C compliance.

#2 Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. This is one Swiss army knife that no web developer should live without. It lets you debug your pages, css, scripts on the fly without making any modification to the original codes. It’s a dream tool for the CSS designers too. It’s meant and made for advanced developers needs in mind.

#3 ColorZilla

With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily. And more…

#4 Tamper Data

Use tamperdata to view and modify HTTP/HTTPS headers and post parameters. It can Trace and time http response/requests. Very useful for Security test web applications by modifying POST parameters.

Note: Current version of Google Web Accelerator is incompatible with the tampering function of TamperData. Your browser might crash.

#5 YSlow

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a add-on integrated with the popular Firebug web development tool. You need to have Firebug Installed before you install YSlow. YSlow gives you Performance report card, HTTP/HTML summary, List of components in the page and Tools including JSLint. YSlow is developed by Yahoo. This tool is very important to analyze your website performance and lags.

#6 IE Tab

IE Tab is a great tool for web developers, since you can easily see how your web page displayed in Micrsoft Internet Explorer with just one click and then switch back to Firefox. It embed the IE right inside a Firefox Tab so that you can review your website how it looks in IE.

#7 FireFTP

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers. FireFTP is fast, secure and handy. It works right inside Firefox in a separate tab. Once you start using it, it’s hard to let it go.

#8 FirePHP

FirePHP is ideally suited for AJAX development where clean JSON or XML responses are required. All data is sent via a set of X-FirePHP-Data response headers. This means that the debugging data will not interfere with the content on your page.

You must have Firebug installed and the “Net” panel enabled to use this extension.
You must also download a PHP library from http://www.firephp.org/HQ/

#9 SeoQuake

A must have tool for the SEO beginners and experts alike. Beginner web masters and seos will find SeoQuake useful for estimating effectiveness and competitive ability of their SEO efforts. In the hands of professional SeoQuake will become a powerful and indispensable tool for analyzing optimization and promotion level of internet web-projects. SeoQuake can be distinguished from similar projects by a wide range of parameters available for analysis, simplicity of use and also a tool for creation of custom parameters.

SeoBar
SeoBar can be described as an additional toolbar, which shows the values of selected parameters for the page currently opened in the browser window. Set of parameters shown by SeoBar is fully customizable by user.

Inclusion of parameters in SERPs
After submission of the query into the search engine user is presented with SERP with search results. SeoQuake shows values of the parameters for search results under each search result shown on SERP. Set of parameters shown is fully customizable by user. Loading of parameters can be handled in two different ways – simultaneously with the loading of the SERP or after SERP loading, by user demand. Ranking of the results by selected parameter in ascending/descending order and storing results in file are available features.

Know more about this tool.

#10 LinkChecker

LinkChecker is a real handy extension to check all the links in a web page automatically and mark them out. Pretty simple but handy and it helps the developers find dead links easily, even from from search engine results.

There are many other tools available for Firefox but these are the most useful and essential tools for everyday web development works.

Do you have a suggestion to add to this list? Feel free to comment.

Ruhani Rabin - Tech, Life and Interestingness

Best Freeware Digital Photo Organizer software for Windows

Picasa from Google

Windows Live Photo Gallery

XnView

Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition

JetPhoto Studio

PicaJet Free Edition

Random Posts

5 Cool Photo Sharing alternatives for Twitter

Pikchur

TweetPhoto

yFrog

Pic.im

Twitgoo

Alternative free useful PHP Forums and Discussion Boards

bbPress

Simple Machines Forum (SMF)

Phorum

The Ultimate PHP Board (MyUPB)

W-Agora Board

XMB Forum

PunBB

miniBB

freeForum

MyBB

ImperialBB

Electron AEF

GBX

fuzzyLime Forum

Free Useful PHP Form Processor Scripts

PHP Contact Form

Secure PHP Mail Form

Form Tools

phpFormGenerator Beta

Tectite FormMail

Ajax Form Builder

MailCode

Silentum FormSend

FormHandler

PHP FormMail Generator

CJ Web2Mail

FormContact

TheWebHelp PHP Contact Form

KillBot Form

SiteMail 2.0

Simple PHP Form Mailer

Elegant Useful and Free PHP Graph/Chart Libraries

OpenFlash Chart 2

Charts with PHP and Google Charts API

XML/SWF Charts

Max’s Chart CSS and PHP Driven

pChart PHP Class with Cache

phpGraphLIB

QGoogleVisualizationAPI (Render charts with Google Visualization API)

Foller.me know more about your twitter followers

Best Adobe AIR Twitter Desktop Clients

TweetDeck

What is TweetDeck?

How does it do that?

Additional Features

Seesmic Desktop

What is Seesmic Desktop?

Key Features

Twhirl

TweetR

Spaz

DestroyTweeter - It’s a nifty handy tool (Never Mind the name cause its just the opposite)

How-to Remove Mikeyy Worm from Twitter Profile

10 Useful free CSS tools and services

#1 Sky CSS Tool

#2 CSS Builder

#3 CSS Code Beautifier

#4 Free CSS Toolbox (Windows Freeware)

#5 CSS Drive CSS Compressor

#6 CSS Menu and Tab Creator

#7 Form Style Generator

#8 CSS Round

#9 CSS Tab Designer (Windows Freeware)

#10 Listamatic