BASECAMP – 37Signals & RoR one of Web 2.0′s Best Start-up Businesses

On average, about half of my client projects in web development over the last year have used Basecamp® for remote-hosted project management of globally distributed teams. Relatively simple in scope and application, Basecamp® provides a secure web environment for centrally managing the communication, task scheduling, and document sharing requirements of IT development projects online.

For a look at the site, interface, features, etc. of Basecamp®, visit BaseCampHQ.com

If you work with CMS software, you will quickly be deconstructing the site and thinking how you could easily rebuild it with a forum, comment section, calendar, etc. That in itself is the main part of the story of Basecamp®. The web design firm who built the site, 37 Signals, launched it in 2004 – right at the time when a huge turnover and change in web development was occurring. In a sense, they capitalized upon the CMS and the outsourcing trends at a time of perfect conjunction with Web 2.0 economic expansion – and Basecamp® became one of the web’s biggest success stories and hottest properties. But Basecamp® also influenced the development of other CMS platforms, helping them evolve into the form we know now. In the process, they also gave birth to the open source web framework Ruby on Rails.

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Vector Magic – Online Conversion of Bitmaps to Vector Images

If you are looking for a quick and easy way to add vector images to your website or blog, it is recommended to take a look at vectormagic.com. The site offers auto tracing capabilities that turn bitmap images into vector based drawings. The interface is extremely simple to use, consisting of just a few configuration steps after uploading an image, but the results are professional and add a great effect to your pages. Vector Magic can also be used when you want to convert a photograph into an avatar image. The site processes graphics for logos with two configuration options, and includes a custom setting specially designed for image conversion. After looking around the web for similar services and trying out a number of sites and applications, Vector Magic provided exactly what I wanted for this graphic design task, and provided high quality .png output as a free download.

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