Tagging’s all the rage, thanks to the likes of Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati and a variety of other social software tools. Allow me to introduce a new site to you – myprogs.net. Folks are building lists of the software they use and tagging the programs. You can check out their tag cloud and find your way to a cool new piece of software or two you might not have otherwise heard of.

Check out Jacuba – it’s a web service that allows you to activate a spell checker inside any form element in your browser. Simply drag their bookmarklet to your browser’s link bar, or bookmark it. Then when you’re filling in a form online, toggle it and viola, you have an instant interactive spell checker – right click on any word Jacuba flags as possibly mis-spelled and you’ll be offered a set of alternatives. This can come in very handy. Folks will laugh but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pasted a word into ecto to make sure I’m spelling it correctly. The tradeoff is that since it’s a web service it can get a little laggy as you type and it passes your data back to their servers to check the spelling. It also doesn’t seem to work universally – I couldn’t coax it into working for my yahoo or gmail accounts for example, meanwhile it worked fine with ebay and my speedymail account. Still, it’s free and no registration required, so it costs you nothing but a few moments to check out and test with whatever services you might need a spell checker.

Here’s something not so surprising – I prefer electronic texts to books these days, especially when it comes to documentation and training materials, for a pretty simple reason – you can search them. The best index in the world still misses 99% of the content, and a decent search engine solves that problem. Every time I buy a text I’m off to usenet and the torrent networks to find a digital copy. The challenge is that the digital texts come in a variety of formats. Enter the excellent $12 utility uBook. It handles almost all ebook formats, has some very handy annotation tools, and is a tiny little application that loads fast and has a responsive UI. PC and pocketpc only, but well worth checking out if you’re on that platform.

As I’ve mentioned, I recently switched over to WordPress for my weblog. The WordPress Codex has been an invaluable resource for me as I worked through the issues I encountered, and as I’ve worked on tweaking the template I’m using. Movabletype and other engines could learn something from the well organized and comprehensive fan-contributed documentation found on the codex. Two thumbs way up all the folks who’ve contributed to the content there. More broadly, the codex serves as a great example of how a carefully moderated wiki can excel as a documentation repository.

All this buzz about Web 2.0, ajax, webapps and so on, it’s the second coming of the web hype machine, and maybe a bit more. But if you’re interested in reviewing all the library options available to you, check out the Open Source Applications Foundation’s wiki page for Ajax Libraries. It’s not comprehensive but it covers the big ones and there are some useful comments about each of the libraries to help you judge which might be most appropriate for the project you’re working on. For what it’s worth I’ve played around with a couple of these now just to see what’s entailed in implementing this stuff and the biggest issue is not so much finding a library to work with, it’s finding one with enough documentation and examples that you can figure out how to handle implementation without tearing your hair out in frustration. The community seems to be well aware of the issue though so hopefully we’ll see better documentation emerge shortly. Meanwhile you can get a head start on most folks by starting to experiment now.

If you do web stuff chances are good you’ll find more than a couple of cheat sheets here that you can use. Kudos to Lorelle VanFossen for pulling all that together in one place.

The scenario – you just walked into a public lab, coffee house, your friend’s house, wherever, and you need to crop some images from your digital camera or whatever. You can’t find an image editor to work with. Solution? Head to imagecrop.com and use their tools. Free, fast, simple as pie to use. My first reaction to this was …? Who needs that? All it can do is crop images? But in general the approach actually seems pretty viable in terms of single-purpose tools supported by adwords. No harm to the consumer, and easy to access tools for folks like my mom, who can’t figure out photoshop to save her life. Of course it really needs some additions to this toolset though, like gamma and other color correction tools, but this is a start to something potentially fairly useful.

Check out the digitalmediaminute.com character entity reference. Remember those charts of the periodic elements you had to learn back in high school chemisty? This is similar but for html character entities. Next time you’re trying to remember how to stick in that © , on a public/friend’s machine with none of your usual web development tools, you might find this useful. It’s also got a few interesting features, like letting you preview what the entities look like in a variety of fonts and styles, and sorting tools so you can quickly find, say, those pesky latin characters.

That’s perhaps a bit grandiose as this needs a bit more time to develop, but Swik is a pretty slick wiki devoted to open source projects that mixes in tagging and blogging to bring an added level of community involvement and oh, we’ll call it serendipity, to the process. What I mean by that is best illustrated by way of example – if you went and typed in WordPress, the weblog system I recently switched to, you’ll get a brief introduction to what wordpress is and on the right you’ll get a list of related projects and terms. One of those terms is weblog, and clicking that will take you to a whole list of weblog-related topics. For those of you familiar with del.icio.us or other web apps using tagging this is nothing revelatory, the difference with Swik is the focus solely on open source projects. If you’re ever trying to track down info on a project, or see me mention something here and wonder what the heck it is, the chances are fair to good that Swik will actually be more useful to you than a google search.

This time, no flash required. Check out the WWW SQL Designer, this is a pretty damned slick ajax/javascript app that lets you visually build out your database tables, and you can then either export your tables as SQL to import into your own database server, or you can download the script and connect it to your own server and write the tables natively. Even if you have no interest in such a thing it’s worth checking out the demo just to see such a well designed ajax interface.