Dummy Image Generator Is the Lorem Ipsum of Images.

Lorem ipsum is a block of dummy text in Latin often used in design and publishing to fill space in a mockup. The brilliant Dummy Image Generator is like ‘lorem ipsum’ for images.

Like ‘lorem ipsum’, the Dynamic Dummy Image Generator offers a glimpse at what content might look like in a layout, but instead of placeholder text, it creates a placeholder image. Using the service is dead simple:

Sometimes you just need a placeholder image right at your finger tips. Just enter the width + x + height at the end of this URL and off you go!

Example: http://dummyimage.com/640x480

You can even use a dummy image as a source in your HTML, like <img src='http://dummyimage.com/340x123' alt='A Dummy Image'>, which would look like this:

The Dynamic Dummy Image Generator is free to use, and is a bit on the geeky side, but if you’re a designer or just spend the occasional free minute tinkering on the web, it’s a really simple, well-executed idea.

(Via Lifehacker.)

PDFMyURL Saves Web Sites as PDF Files [PDF]

Saving something as a PDF file is a great way to preserve it for future reference or for sharing with others, without risking the site changing before you look at it again. PDFMyURL makes it easy to convert sites to PDF.

Point PDFMyURL at a website URL and it will convert the site into a PDF document. Not only can you do a simple conversion just by plugging in a URL but you can also modify the PDF with a wide variety of flags—see the advanced menu for a full list—that let you set the page orientation and size, header information, print orientation, and more. PDFMyURL also has a bookmarklet you can drag to your toolbar for easy access to the PDF creation service.

PDFMyURL is a free service and doesn’t watermark or otherwise alter the site you are converting to PDF.

(Via Lifehacker.)

Google Voice Message Playback Comes to Gmail

If you’re both a Gmail and Google Voice user, you should be thrilled with the latest feature from Gmail Labs: The Google Voice Player feature embeds a voicemail player inside Gmail so you can listen to new messages directly inside Gmail.

To enable it, just hit up the Labs link in Gmail, find the Google Voice player in mail feature, click enable, and save your changes. Now not only can you read your transcribed voicemail from directly inside Gmail—you can listen to it, too. In fact, your message status will even sync to Google Voice, so if you’ve listened to it in Gmail, it’ll show as listened to in Google Voice, too. Handy.

(Via Lifehacker.)