Paul Butler.org

I have been following the progress of a start-up called microPledge for a while now. The site lets you post an idea for software you would use and pledge money towards its creation. I came across a proposal for a piece of software that lets you copy an image from any website to your server in a few clicks. It is a problem I have had before, and I figured I could use the software too, so I made a bid to create it for $10 and I got the project. Before I finished, a few more people pledged on it, so I ended up making $23 for it. This was still not much money for the work I did, but the cool part is that at the end of the project I can release it to the public (in fact, microPledge does this automatically). So the way I look at it is, I would have spent that time writing open-source code anyway, I might as well get a free lunch or two out of it.

As far as I can tell, this was the first open-source project to be completed through microPledge. We ran into a few bugs, but Ben Hoyt, one of the site’s founders, was very helpful and fixed all the bugs we ran into within hours. If you want to pitch an open-source project idea to programmers, microPledge is the place to go. Greg, the guy who pitched the idea and pledged towards it, had a good experience as well.

As for the script, basically it sits on your server and lets you add a little button (a bookmarklet) to your browser. When you click the button, all the images on the page you are on have a little cross-hair over them when you mouse-over them, and when you click them they are downloaded to your server and you are shown the URL. This is great for when you come across a GPL or fair-use image so you don’t have to go through the process of manually uploading it to your server, or hotlinking it. You can find the latest version hosted at microPledge.