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So there you sit, with the coolest PNG image of all time. If only you could turn it into an ICO-formatted icon. Or maybe you've got an icon you'd like to use as a regular image. What to do?

ConvertICO is a free service that has the answer for this vexing problem. Go to their site, end either enter the URL for an image living on the web, or browse and select the file on your computer and upload it. Press the magic button, and quicker than you can say something quickly, you'll have your converted file. Just download your freshly-converted image, and go on your way. It's quick, it's easy, and you don't even have to register, meaning you won't have to endure years of spam to pay for a simple file conversion.

All you need to use ConvertICO is a web browser and an image you want to convert.

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Stephen Covey tells us to "begin with the end in mind." After all, if you don't know where you're going, how will you know when you get there? Even though planning something may not be as fun or interesting as doing that thing, it's really a good idea.

There are all kinds of tools out there to help you plan things. Plan your schedule; plan your finances; plan your wedding. How about your garden? The folks at Better Homes and Gardens have a tool you might be interested in. Oddly enough, it's aptly named "Plan-A-Garden".

With Plan-A-Garden, you can design and lay-out your garden. Choose from prefab layouts, or choose to start with a blank slate. You get to define the space, dragging borders to size it appropriately. Drag and drop from a huge list of objects to incorporate structures, like walkways and patios, as well as more plant-related features, like garden beds, annuals and perennials, trees, and more into your garden. Save your work, send it to a friend, or print it out.

Plan-A-Garden is a free online tool. You have to register to use it, but if you check- and uncheck all the appropriate boxes, you shouldn't be deluged with spam.

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There are plenty of paint and drawing applications out there. There are the tried and true desktop apps like Photoshop and Illustrator. Or you might choose from among their more generic equivalents, like GIMP and Inkscape. There are even online tools you can use to create and edit pictures. The newest one of these is Cloud Canvas.

Cloud Canvas is an online graphics tool. Unlike other web-based editing tools, this one does not depend on Flash; rather, it's built on HTML5. That means that once you've got an HTML5-compliant browser, you don't need to worry about upgrading proprietary plugins to use this tool. It's got all the functionality you would expect from both a paint app and a vector drawing tool, with the ability to size drawings and use tools to create lines, curves, rectangles and ellipses, add text, tweak colors, and more. And you can use Cloud Canvas in one place that you could never use a Flash-based tool: on your new iPad—remember, iPad doesn't support Flash.

A free online service, you should be able to use Cloud Canvas on any platform that supports an HTML5-compliant web browser. And, of course, you'll also need that browser.

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There are lots of ways to convert a Word DOC into a PDF file. There are printer drivers that let you "print" a PDF, there are online services that you can upload documents to, or even desktop apps that will do the deed. What is sorely lacking is a tool that will go the other direction: take a PDF and convert it back into a DOC.

So why would you want it as a DOC? The biggest reason, other than a deep-seated love of all things Microsoft, could be to edit the beast. While PDFs are swell to share with others, there's not much you can do to modify them once they're out there. That's where PDF2Word Online just might come in handy.

With this free service, you upload your PDF file, and after it grinds away on it for a minute or three, you can download your fully-editable, Microsoft-friendly document. When we tried it, we got back an RTF (Rich Text Format) file, sort of a generic version of a DOC. While there was a font or two that were a little out of whack, it correctly rebuilt the sizes of all the text on the page, as well as correctly rendering a fairly complicated table. It was deemed "close enough", and we were thrilled to not have to go back and rebuild the page from scratch.

PDF2Word Online is a free service. All you're going to need to take advantage of it is a web browser and a PDF file that you want to be able to edit.

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As you tool around the Web, you're going to run across pages that you want to revisit, or that contain information you want to keep track of. You can bookmark those pages or add them to your favorites from the convenience of your browser. If you want to share them, or access them from different locations, using a bookmarking service like Delicious may be the way to go. But what if you want to keep track of that page and remember just what it was on there that was so interesting?

iCyte is a tool that lets you do just that. After you sign up for a free account, you can start saving the pages you want to keep track of. Now you can highlight important text, make notes and annotations, add tags, and otherwise mark up your page. Keep it all to yourself, or share it with others.

A free service, iCyte should work with recent browsers (they support IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari) for saving pages; once those pages are saved, you should be able to pull them up with just about any web browser.

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It's one thing to thoroughly research and write your paper, thesis, dissertation, or even letter to the City Council; it's another thing to get all the citations right. After all, unless you're only compiling your own data, you are no doubt depending on the work of others. And we all know that we need to give credit where credit is due, meaning you need to cite those sources. But how do you correctly and accurately give your sources? And what format should you use?

EasyBib is a site that can give you a hand with all that. Whether you need to cite a book, newspaper, website, or any of dozens of other sources (song? patent? podcast?), these guys can give you the correct format. And speaking of format, you can get your citations in MLA, APA, or Chicago Manual of Style formats. And even better, it organizes your sources into a list, suitable for inclusion in- or adding to your bibliography. Now your readers, whether that pesky Econ. professor or just the fans of your blog, will know for sure what you're talking about. Or at least where you got your information.

A free service, EasyBib just requires a web browser and a citation for formatting.

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When you blog regularly, one of the tricks you learn quickly is that you can write posts ahead of time and just tweak the dates on your posts so that they go live at some time in the future. No, you don't really have to sit down at 6:00 am every day to have a daily post, just post-date them, as it were, and go from there. But blogs—they're so last year.

Twitter seems to be the new go-to location for getting your story out there. Whether it's just killing time (eating ice cream—yum!), making a political rant, or even doing a little guerilla marketing as part of your latest website promotion, Tweeting is a whole new way to go. Unfortunately Twitter doesn't have any mechanism that allows you to write now and publish later. SocialOomph is a tool that lets you do just that.

Just set up a free account with these guys, tie it back to your Twitter account, and you're good to go. Now you can write your stuff in advance, and when the magic moment arrives, SocialOomph will make sure that your thoughts, ideas, and observations become full-on Tweets. You can hit the East Coast before you roll out of bed, or hit the Left Coast long after you've retired for the evening. Hey, you can even tell everybody about your vacation before you take it. Or not.

SocialOomph is a free service. Just sign up for an account, hook it into your Twitter account, and let the good times roll.

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It's hard to get through the day without needing to take a screenshot of something. Whether you're checking out a page layout or grabbing an image, the ability to take a snapshot of what you're seeing on-screen can make all the difference. Most screenshot tools are pretty much alike: grab a screen or individual window, dump it to a file, and away you go. Some of the fancier ones let you define a region you want to grab. Well here's one that lets you automatically put your screenshots online with no muss and no fuss.

Gyazo is a free screen capture tool that lets you take your snapshot and then saves it for you online. Once it's done, it drops the URL for your new image onto your clipboard, so you can paste it into an email, browser, Tweet, or wherever your little heart desires. Or if you've already got an image on your desktop that you want to share, just do the drag-and-drop thing onto the Gyazo application icon and your picture will be automagically uploaded for you.

Gyazo comes in two pieces. There's a desktop application that you download and install onto your computer—it's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux systems—as well as the online service that hosts your images. One word of warning here: there is currently no way to modify or delete your images once they're online, so you may want to leave the photos of the last office party off the list for now.

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One of the first things they teach you in Meetings 101 (after the part about having food available) is to write things down. For everybody in the group to get the most out of what you've written, it's best to put it out there for everybody to see. Generally this means using a big flip chart on an easel, a chalkboard, or the go-to solution: the whiteboard. It's easy to add, tweak, and highlight everyone's contributions, and it's easy for everybody to be on the same page when everybody's on the same page.

Writeboard is a way you can use a whiteboard when you're not all in the same room. Along with plain old text, there are options for some formatting— bold and italics, numbered- and bulleted lists, headers, and even hyperlinks—to help make your point. Others can edit your page or add comments, so everybody's going to be heard. As you make changes, earlier versions are saved, so you can go back and walk through the process when you try to figure out how we got from the beginning to here. Writeboards are password protected, although you probably shouldn't put your super secret formula on there, since there is really no guarantee that your information is going to remain private.

Writeboard is a free online service. All you need to use it is a modern web browser and an email address.

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Like it or hate it, Twitter's here to stay. The ubiquitous microblogging platform has everybody tweeting "what's happening?" While reaching out and touching folks may be handy, sometimes there's a limited number of people you want to interact with. Like maybe only your coworkers or your clients, and not everybody and their cousin. In that case, Twitter may not be for you.

Present.ly is a microblogging service that lets you post updates and for others to follow you, but it's private, meaning that only the people you let in have access to you. Create groups for projects, departments, or whatever strikes your fancy. You can even use it to share documents with others. And like Twitter, you can access it via your computer, as well as your smart phone, or virtually any other device that can access the 'Net.

Present.ly is a free service. If you decide you need a more robust version that you can host on your own metal, they'll be happy to sell you an enterprise license for your organization.

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