In my early days of software development I developed and application for a local hotel. The application had a cool graphical interface for making reservations and housekeeping. It showed an areal view of the hotel and you clicked on a room to interact with it. It was pretty cool.

Todays Code Pick brings back memories of that application. It's called Booking Pad and if your business takes reservations then Booking Pad will take your reservation system online. Best of all it's a free download and can be integrated into any website.

Some uses for Booking Pad could be:

• Seat Bookings (Ballet, Movies, Theatre, Air Services, Ferries)
• Professional Bookings (Doctors, Dentists, Accountants)
• Trade Bookings (Plumbers, Electricians, Hairdressers, Massage Therapists)
• Sport Bookings (Tennis Courts, Squash Courts, Basketball Courts)
• Venue Bookings (Halls, Recreation Centers)
• Event Bookings (Travel, Plays, Holidays, Scout or School Camps)

Take a look at Booking Pad today by visiting their website. www.bookingpad.com

And remember, if you need help setting up Booking Pad or anything else on your website just let me know how I can help.

I ran across a useful acrticle on dottony the other day which listed 30 useful Ajax Lightbox and Modal Dialog solutions. I particularly liked ColorBox.

ColorBox supports photos, photo groups, slideshow, ajax, inline, and iframed content. Weighing in at only 9KB of JavaScript it's lightweight and the appearance of ColorBox can be controlled via CSS.

30 Useful Ajax Lightbox and Modal Dialog Solutions
ColorBox

Are you looking for an unobtrusive way to add splash content to your website? In this edition of Code Pick I am going to show you an easy, user friendly, and free way to add content to your site through a splash interface.

Are you aggravated when you visit a site and a splash or popup screen opens just about the time you start reading the page? This can be frustrating to visitors and is the equivalent of someone walking into your store and immediately being confronted by a sales person.

You can have the best of both worlds on your site by using Meerkat, an easy to use script that allows you to add splash content in an unobtrusive way. Meerkat, named for its pop up like behavior, is a jQuery plugin created by Jarod Taylor. It was originally created to serve a specific purpose, however, by adding additional functionality to it, Jarod has found several uses for it and you might too.

Take a peek at the Meerkat Demo

My Code Pick for September is a free Flash image viewer called AutoViewer. As describer by the publisher, SimpleViewer.net, AutoViewer is designed to display a linear sequence of images and captions. AutoViewer stood out to me because it is quick and easy to impliment on your website, it is Flash based, and looks cool.

The instructions for downloading and setting up the AutoViewer application was straightforward and provided all I needed to install and setup the software. I started out at the AutoViewer website and only went to the AutoViewer FAQ page once after my first try at loading the page failed.

I quickly realized that every image file uploaded to AutoViewer has to be a JPG image file. Somehow I ended up with a thumbs.db file on the server by accident. AutoViewer loaded, even showed the pictures, but the images were stacked on top of each other and would not slide across the page. Simply deleting the thumbs.db file from the server solved the problem and my AutoViewer gallery was up and running.

Wanna see AutoViewer in action? Take a look at my gallery running on AutoViewer: Gallery of Raymond Brady

What is Code Pick?
Periodically I pick a website application that has really stood out to me and review it here on biz316.com.