How a Little Money Saves a Lot of Time: 3 Examples

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you probably already know that I like to do everything myself. It’s both for the satisfaction of having done it yourself and to save money. But recently I’ve discovered that it can be a wise decision to invest in quality services offered by others. For instance, I never thought I’d buy a WordPress theme but, this weekend, I bought a WooTheme. I got myself the ProBlogger’s blogger scorecard and am considering a GetSatisfaction membership.

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Generating PDF files on Google App Engine

A while ago, I explained the way I was going to create PDF files on Google AppEngine. Turns out that, once I started to really test this solution, there were a few holes in my strategy. Well actually, there was only one, but it was a major one: importing HTML files into Google Docs is a mess. Hardly any of the HTML formatting is preserved by Google Docs. You might get away with a little right align and bold here and there, but any table is completely ruined, as are some more advanced formatting options.

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Embedding Bitmap Images in ActionScript 3 with FlashDevelop

ActionScript is probably one of the easiest languages to program visual effects. It has a wealth of APIs to manipulate images in all kinds of different ways. However, getting images into your program isn’t all that well documented. Especially if you are not working with Adobe’s commercial Flash products. For instance, the wonderful and free FlashDevelop. This article shows how to use the “embed” tag to embed images inside your Flash applet, which is one of the cleanest ways you can add those bitmaps to your application.

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Offline E-mail Clients Top Picks

I’ve been looking into mail clients lately. At work I use Outlook, and for my other mailing needs I have Gmail. Neither of these options are bad, but I’m also not too excited about both. So I’ve been looking around and found a few options and I’m now using a few. I can’t give you any definite judgment just yet, but here’s  a list of what I found and liked.

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