Just want to take a moment to observe once again that Gallery is one of the greatest open source projects available. I updated to the newest version this weekend and once again the process was smooth, well documented, and glitch-free. This update adds back in a feature from the original Gallery 1 version – RSS feeds for galleries, which means you can now subscribe to the RSS feed for the gallery again and know when I’ve posted new pictures. The link to the feed is on the right column of this page along with the other feeds.

Ever done any side work or sold something on ebay or elsewhere and needed an invoice? Chances are if you’re like me you used some crappy word processing template or simply typed up a bill of sale. Blinksale offers a credible alternative to this. It’s a free (depending on how frequently you need to use it) web service with great templates and an excellent interface. Log in, create your invoice, print, and you’re done. It’s capable of more if you need it – tracking payment, invoice date and so on, but it’s also drop dead easy if all you need to do is create and send an invoice.

Scrapbook is a Firefox extension which allows you to capture portions of websites or the entire website and store it locally on your machine, where you can then search the contents, make notes on them, and organize them as you see fit. It’s free and is good at what it does.

I’ll confess that I don’t really buy the use of the browser as a scrap booking tool. I’m doing similar things using Devonthink Pro though (capturing the full contents of websites along with snippets from them) as a knowledgebase tool so I understand where this is coming from conceptually. It just seems to me that lacking some of the intelligent filtering that Devonthink provides this isn’t nearly as useful. Still, many folks seem to use and like it. Maybe you’ll become one of them.

Check out this handy web-based .htaccess generator. Can’t remember how to add that cgi handler, or how to match against a local passwd for authentication? This is the tool for you. Fill out the form, submit, and it will provide you with the text to tuck into your .htaccess file. Drop that into the directory and you’re good to go.

I’ve posted about Jotspot several times, and at one point wondered how they’d actually make it with a for-pay wiki play when there are plenty of free alternatives out there. Partner with the big boys seems to be the answer – ebay began testing the use of a wiki for their customers and Jot is the vendor who’s providing their wiki engine. Kudos to the Jot folks – I love their tech, used it quite a bit when I was at Skidmore, and am happy to see them getting commercial recognition for their excellent tools.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a trick that enabled you to get in on the yahoo email beta. A little history is on order here. Several years ago a company called Oddpost began offering webmail accounts with a really slick interface. It was IE only though, and after a bit Yahoo snapped them up and indicated they would enhance the client and make it cross browser compatible. At least two years have passed since then. For whatever reason Yahoo seems to be struggling with this, and in the interim gmail came out and pretty much defined what a web 2.0 mail interface ought to look like. This is the core of Yahoo’s problem now, because their new interface suffers in comparion. Much like Yahoo’s homepage, the webmail client is too cluttered with crap, and what’s worse is that it’s an ajax app so it streams this crap in piecemeal and this can literally freeze the browser or make it very unresponsive while it pulls the elements that make up the interface down.

Long story short, after about a month and a half with the beta I’ve switched back. It’s possible that Yahoo can address some of these problems – for example, they might not have enough bandwith/servers allocated to the beta which could be causing the slow streaming in of the data and the browser sluggishness – but even if they address that, it doesn’t address their clumsy and cluttered user interface. Given the evolution of their homepage it seems less likely they’ll effectively address this (they seem to subscribe to the ‘more is better’ school of design at a time when google and many web 2.0 companies (37 signals, del.icio.us, digg, to name just a few examples) are demonstrating that the opposite is true.

Still, I’ll keep an open mind and try it again when they go live with it for all customers, or announce another round of beta testing, to see if it’s improved to the point of actually being usable.

The user interface isn’t as elegant as my current favorite, Ecto, but Bleezer is an otherwise excellent cross platform blogging tool that has the added benefit of being free. It’s java based so there’s an initial bit of sluggishness when it’s first launched but once it’s running it’s speedy. It also supports publishing to more blogging systems than any client I’ve seen to date, and it supports tagging for del.icio.us and Technorati. It’s also capable of downloading your current blog postings and keeping a local archive of them, which not all blogging tools can do. Setup was a breeze and it’s a tiny download. This is definitely worth checking out if you haven’t invested in a blogging tool yet or if you’re managing a lab or campus computer image and need a cross platform tool for consistency of user interface and ease of documentation.

Me too. In case you’re not aware, Firefox leaks memory like a sieve. On the Mac this doesn’t cause too much of an issue normally, but on the PC it can be a real bitch, slowing the browser down to a crawl after a while. There’s no 100% solution to this problem but there is now at least a diagnostic tool. Some of the memory leaking is caused by poorly written extensions. If your Firefox memory leaking is chronic, you might try the Leak Monitor extension, which will help you identify which extension/s are causing the problem. Free, cross platform, and a tiny download.