This site just lets you quickly encode and decode a string so it can be passed in a URL without messing it up. I am glad that people host these kind of simple tools. It saves me from having to throw together a quick script myself.

http://www.albionresearch.com/misc/urlencode.php

This is a great online tool for making changes and quick corrections to pdf files, which are normally not editable. It works by letting you upload a PDF and then you can modify it by overlaying text, shapes and pictures. This means while you are not actually editing the contents of the PDF itself, you can still make changes. For example, if you wanted to correct the spelling of a word; you can't just select the text and re-type it, but you can white out the word by putting a white box over it and then you could type some new text on top of the white box.

http://www.pdfescape.com

This is a group event scheduling website that allows someone to create an event and then invite others (by email) to work out a time when everyone is available. Great for scheduling events with lots of people.

The interface is quite nice and it doesn't require registration to get started.

http://www.presdo.com

If you ever see a flag you don't recognize and want to know where it is from, this site has a really good flag searching tool. The look of the site is a bit out of date, but I was really impressed with how useful their flag search was.

http://www.flags.net

I came across this website today while researching online graphical tools. It is a site that allows you to upload and then resize and modify a graphic, much in the way you would with a desktop application like GIMP or Photoshop. Although this web application is not quite advanced as something like GIMP, it does allow you to resize, apply filters and touch up photos and such.

I like these types of sites because I think it is really cool to see more and more highly functional applications work from the web browser, rather than having to download and install them.

http://gui.picresize.com/picresize2/

They also provide an API so you can use this type of functionality on your own website. You can submit pictures to their server for resizing and modification.

http://gui.picresize.com/api/

However they do impose some limits on usage. So if you are going to be doing a large amount dynamic graphic modification for a website, it might be best for you to just install a graphics library yourself. GD is a popular (and Open Source) graphical development toolkit and has implementations in most of the popular web languages, including PHP, Python, Perl and Ruby.

http://www.libgd.org

This is a clever concept for a website (however I am not sure how often I am going to com to rely on it). It allows you to create a note that will be destroyed upon its first viewing. Once you write a note; it will give you a special link to that note, but once it is viewed for the first time (by anyone who knows the link) the link will cease to exist.

https://privnote.com

This is a website that uses a Java applet to generate rather artistic word clouds with ease. You can either type/copy and paste text or pull text from a website to give the generator a word set. Then it will take that word set and create a random word cloud, which you can customize by changing colors, fonts and layout. The best way to understand what it does is to try it for yourself.

Here is a link to one that I generated from the text on this blog.

Try it out for yourself at the link below.

http://wordle.net

HyperCard was a development platform on the Mac that featured some of the ideas that were used in the foundations of the web (things like the hyperlink and element scripting). It also was the first platform that I really got into developing for. The programs you write for it work kinda like a slide show that can be improved by scripting elements you place on each slide (things like buttons or fields to switch slides or do lookups and calculations).

Anyway, this website is implementing a web based version of it. It looks pretty interesting and they are making the scripting for it (called Speak) to be almost fully backwards compatible to HyperTalk (HyperCard's built-in language). I signed up for the beta but haven't got my invitation yet to try it out. Looks like it could be fun.

http://www.tilestack.com

This is a simple website that I came across yesterday that aggregates rental information from across numerous rental searching sites. You tell it where you live, a little bit about the property and how much you are currently paying in rent each month and it will give you a report about the area and how your rate compares to comparable listings in the area.

I really like this site because it has a clear, simple and useful purpose and it is very easy to use.

Check it out and find out if you are paying too much in rent.

http://www.rentometer.com

This is a Javascript based password strength tester. It works really well and the code is available under the GPL.

http://www.passwordmeter.com