Refs

This is an old post I had in draft mode and thought I'd go ahead and post it.


An old (maybe 60's?) SESAME STREET clip of "How Crayons Are Made."
I am such a TOTAL NERD that I actually watched this and liked it.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=oJJcZ4BGPnc

A 'paint'-like program available FREE on a website that exports right to a JPG you can then upload with an RV session. I'm not much for digital mouse-drawing -- I'm nearly retarded with a mouse (and especially touchpad) as it is -- but some people are keen on it and you can't beat the price or the export on the spot option.
http://www.depicter.com/

This nifty graph creator may not allow many data points, but it'll create free online -- and export to a variety of image formats -- a very pretty graph, totally customizeable. It has a simple user interface I admire too.
http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/index.asp

For temporal dowsers or anybody who needs to make things like timelines of a variety of types, this page has instructions and links on how to use Excel to do a variety of need things with the timeline concept:
http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/timeline.html

A few folks complain they have no software to get their BMP scans into a web format (which would be, generally, GIF or JPG or PDF). GIMP is free software that is along the lines of photoshop or PaintShop Pro -- less complex of course, yet FREE, and it will let you open most basic format images, and then save as a different image type, so it functions as a conversion utility as well as a graphics program. There's also tons of info on it, wikis and more.
http://www.gimp.org/

I love this thing, you know those itty-bitty images most famously used for RSS type links, this will create them on the fly for you http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/button/ generates the cute little rss type buttons

For music online, a certain kind of coded-text-file is often used for the playlist. For people who might want to stick a little music player on their blog or site but don't write code, this free generator will let you choose your player type and other info and then output the html you can just copy and paste into a file for your playlist.
http://web.forret.com/tools/webjay.asp
http://web.forret.com/tools/webjay.asp

Very cool button-maker, you can even incorporate images, great for putting in a logo. Flexible and addictive. http://www.lucazappa.com/brilliantMaker/buttonImage.php

Few other image creators:
Button Maker (http://www.kalsey.com/tools/buttonmaker/) by Adam Kalsey: nice simple interface, no image upload though
Button Maker Online (http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/button/) (beta): another button maker, supports different sizes, and has a nice color picker - but no image upload (I just found this one)
Silkscreen (http://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/index.html): the best font to use to create your own micro buttons, free for personal and corporate use
W3C buttons without images (http://www.sovavsiti.cz/css/w3c_buttons.html): nice, but they do have some drawbacks - not all browsers can porperly handle these
CSS Technique: Inline Buttons (2.0) (http://wellstyled.com/css-inline-buttons.html): another approach to the same idea

More to steal:
Raging Platypus http://www.ragingplatypus.com/blog/2003/03/19/steal_these_buttons.html blog post; the actual stealable buttons are on the home page
Steal These Buttons, Too http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/examples/plat-buttons.html
Joe Grossberg: Steal These Buttons Too http://www.joegrossberg.com/archives/000574.html
Steal these Buttons http://gtmcknight.com/buttons/ A huge, categorized collection (menu on the left - or use the search)