I've received a handful of emails within the past week regarding my cfimagecropper custom tag. Each complained of various files/folders missing from the download at RIAForge. I checked the download, and sure enough there were some files missing. So I posted a new zip up on RIAForge and everything should be good to go. Please accept my apologies if you had issues within the last week with that tag. Download the new version and you should be good to go.

I'd like to begin a series of posts detailing some of the cooler features of SlideSix.com. In this series I hope to share some of my lessons learned and feature some of the code that went into building the site.

This post shows one of my favorite features: the image cropper.

When editing your profile (or your group) you are given the option to upload a user image. It's always a challenge to ensure a consistent image size when you allow your users to upload an image. Thankfully it was super easy thanks to the built in imageCrop function (on the server) and my cfImageCropper custom tag (on the client side). I'm not going to highlight the exact code here since I've done so in my cfimagecropper posts here on my blog. Essentially it's as easy as detecting the image upload, optionally resizing the image down to 700px wide (so that it fits comfortably in the browser), alerting CF that an image crop is needed after the form is saved and including the image crop utility in a cfwindow. I constrain the crop area to 150px x 150px to ensure a consistent image size. The actual user image does not get saved until and unless the image is cropped to safeguard against the user navigating away from the page before completing the crop.

ME! OK, so it's second place, but still, I just found out that my cfImageCropper has won in the first ever RainFest over at AjaxRain.com! Pretty cool!

I've had about a dozen other cool ideas floating around in my head over the last few weeks but have been so busy I've not had time to work on them. I promise some more cool stuff soon!

Speaking of contests, I hear there is another really cool one coming very very soon...

I just noticed that AjaxRain is running a contest called Rain Fest in which they give away some cash to the month's coolest entries. My cfImageCropper demo made it into the contest (so did a few entries by some other guy). Make sure you stop over there and vote for your favorite. Let's show the world that CF makes Ajax great and easy!! Vote early and often!!

I've finally put together some proper documentation for my cfImageCropper custom tag. You can get the latest release here which includes the documentation and a few minor code tweaks. If you're not familiar with the tag see this post

I'm also cooking up some other very cool client side image stuff in the labs, so stay tuned.

Yesterday I decided to change my headshot on GMail and noticed that when I uploaded my new image there was a slick little tool to crop my headshot. Obviously Google is using some sort of client side JS to do the cropping and then doing the actual image resize on the server (so I assume). I was pretty impressed by this and it got me thinking how simple it would be to throw something together like this for use with the new imageCrop function in ColdFusion 8 (or any image manipulation package for that matter).