However it is still going strong and a couple of things prompted me to release this update to bring it to v1.2.1.

The first thing was Tom Hirashima (sorry Tom, wasn’t sure if you have a site you want me to link to) sent me an email last week with an update to the code to allow it to work with the latest versions of Prototype & script.aculo.us out of the box (1.6.1.0 & 1.8.2 respectively). Although the last time I tried the cropper with the latest versions of them both it worked fine, you just had to change the bundles that script.aculo.us included, Tom has made some further changes. This is a good thing as for the past couple of years I’ve pretty much been out of the prototype & script.aculo.us loop having moved to MooTools and now jQuery (which I hated at first, but that’s another story).

The second thing was that the cropper was mentioned (and my how old does this site design look to me now) in the latest (and as usual excellent) Railscast, Cropping Images.

As a part of integrating Tom’s changes I decided to tackle a load of bugs from the bug list to try and reduce the list so I can keep on top of it better going forward (a long list of open bugs is never conducive to getting any of them fixed).

Here’s a full list of the changes:

• Added support for latest versions of Prototype & script.aculo.us (1.6.1.0 & 1.8.2 respectively). Changes provided by Tom Hirashima.
• No-longer package prototype & script.aculo.us with the release
• Changed tests to use google ajax libraries API to load prototype & script.aculo.us
• Added option to not auto include the cropper CSS file
• #00008 – Fixed bug: Dynamic include of cropper CSS expected cropper.js and failed when using cropper.uncompressed.js
• #00028 – Fixed bug: Doesn’t work with latest script.aculo.us – Fix by Tom Hirashima
• #00030 – Fixed bug: Doesn’t work in Firefox 3.5 (CSS include issue)
• #00007 – Fixed bug: onEndCrop isn’t called when moving with keys
• #00011 – Fixed bug: The image that is to be cropped does not show in IE6.0 — included CSS fix
• Tidied up source code & fixed issues that jslint found so it will compress better

Finally as usual, please use the bug reporting link or discussion list mentioned on JavaScript Image Cropper UI code page rather than leaving comments to report bugs.

Head over to the JavaScript Image Cropper UI code page for download and documentation.

Advertisement: JavaScript Image Cropper UI Download my feature-rich JavaScript Image Cropper.

This usually results in me (just seconds after sending the email) having to write a short follow-up email saying how I’d forgot to attach them and ensure with the attachments included (as it’s really bad when you forget the attachments on this second email).

I remembered seeing that Gmail labs have added a forgotten attachment feature recently, so I did a quick search to find a plugin for Thunderbird that allows me to do the same (as I use Gmail over IMAP most of the time).

The plugin I found is called Check and Send which allows you to check quite a few things (or prompt you to manually double check every email before you really send it – which I disabled straight away) but most importantly it has the following check:

whether the words you pre-defined exist in the message and the message does not have any attachments

Bingo, that’ll do nicely. Now whenever I write ‘attached’ or ‘attachment’ it will let me know if the email doesn’t have any attachment. It even ignores any quoted text.

• Fix as many bugs as possible, if not all.
• Add a couple of new features to the base cropper.
• Core architectural changes to improve flexibility of the cropper, read alternative framework support.
• Improved documentation and support network.
• Improvements to maintenance and updates, read more regular updates.
• Any performance improvements that can be made (a fresh look at the code always seems to reveal areas that can be improved).

Over the past couple of evenings I have documented and investigated my plans and the architectural changes that I would need to implement to take the cropper to the next level and these have provided me with a rough timeframe for completion of V2.

However I am incredibly busy at the moment and other commitments are taking priority, but I also do not want the cropper codebase to stagnate as I understand the popularity of the cropper — it’s the main traffic driver on my site and has had nearly 32,000 downloads so far and is averaging over 1,000 per month.

But as I say my other commitments are taking priority and a lot of my spare time, so I thought I would try an experiment, fund raising.

Why fund raising?
Firstly I must state that this is not about the money, if it were I would not release my code for free (and this will continue for version 2 of the cropper). But it is the only thing I could think of that could give me a clear indication of the desire for an updated version of the cropper. It is all well and good having the odd comments praising the cropper and/or mentioning the desire for feature x or bug fix y, but it is something different to put your money towards achieving that.

So far the cropper donation ratio is about 0.04% of all downloads result in a donation (that’s 14 donations out of around 32,000 downloads), so the fund raising activity should really test the reaction of the version 2 plans — thus the target figure I’ve entered and the timeframe are not as important to me the reaction.

So when will version 2 be released?
That is partly down to the results of the fund raising, I do seriously want to implement all my plans, but whether that’s this month, next month, next June etc. I cannot specify right now due to my current commitments, all I can say is that if the reaction to the fund raising is successful then it will help me prioritise the cropper appropriately and will result in version 2 being released sooner rather than later.

Okay, enough of the sales patter, how do I donate?
I’ve setup a campaign on Pledgie, which you can use your existing PayPal account (or credit card if you don’t have a PayPal account) to make a donation.

I look forward to your help and support and the changes that V2 will bring to the cropper.

The story all begins when I took over the Coldfusion platform support for, I started to find myself spending a bit of time watching cfstat on the servers to get a feel for the current status of the machines. As we had multiple servers (then 4, now 6) and only being able to get to cfstat directly on the machine, this was not really practicable.

What I really wanted was a little desktop application that could give me the headlines of cfstat for as many servers as we had, all in an easy to digest format, the result is the CFStatShot Yahoo Desktop Widget.

"Dude, look Safari on Windows"

I was a little incredulous at first, but it turns out it’s true you can now get Safari for Windows.

While this is interesting I think I’ll be sticking with Firefox, as I’ve never got on with Safari on the Mac anyway. I’ll give it a try though as it does seem silly fast compared to the other Windows browsers.

Finally one thing I’ve noticed is that when having a dual monitor setup is that some programs don’t handle that too well, allSnap handles them perfectly, each monitor has it’s own snap for its desktop boundaries, fantastic.

Fast forward to today and I switch sites in IIS to test something else and suddenly IIS is serving the Coldfusion pages as octet streams and the browser is asking if I want to save or open them, this is not good. So I go through the whole process of removing and adding CF again via WSConfig, no luck. I manually restart IIS and then Coldfusion, still no luck. I go back to the first site, the one with the flash forms, and that’s not working anymore. Hmmmm.

After a bit more fiddling I figure out that if I type in the exact URL of a template (e.g. index.cfm) everything works fine, the problem is only occurring when IIS is trying to hit a default document that is a CF file or catch an error that redirects to a CF file; which is odd.

I spend what seems like hours (in between other things I’m doing) spent in an endless circle of removing and re-applying the CF configuration using WSConfig, restarting CF, searching on the web for ideas and similar problems, restarting IIS, restarting the machine, shouting at the monitor and throwing things (not necessarily in that order). I even tried searching for "WSConfig is rubbish", which returned nothing at all – which isn’t very helpful.

I eventually found a very handy post by Peter J. Farrell, as an aside I’ve always wondered what makes a person choose to use one or more of their initials in every day use – I guess for actors and writers it has something to do with previous artists and to avoid confusion with them. Anyway I’m getting distracted from the point; which was the post by Peter that saved my afternoon. Although the problems described didn’t directly relate to my problem, I wasn’t getting the same error messages and I’m using IIS, it also didn’t appear under a search for "WSConfig is rubbish" but I gave it a try.

Two minutes later me, Coldfusion, IIS and my monitor (and possibly my work who colleagues may have been thinking I was slightly unhinged) were happy once again.

So if you have any sort of problems with WSConfig, be sure to give Peters post a try, it could be the difference between sanity and eating cereal from a slipper – with a comb.

In the browser example if one of those browsers crashed, usually IE 5.5 or 5.0 in the hacky multiple browser setup you need to do for IE, then they’d be out of order and it really bugged me. Well it bugs me no more, thanks to the wonderful (and free) Taskbar Shuffle, which allows me to reorder taskbar entries. If you too like to keep your taskbar in order then this download is a must for you.