I’ve been building quite a few applications lately, and one thing I’ve learned is that finding bugs is easy. Keeping track of them all is another story.

I’ll be testing something, notice a button doesn’t work, a page looks terrible on mobile, or something that worked yesterday suddenly doesn’t work today. Sound familiar?

Sure, there are plenty of bug-tracking systems out there, but most of them seem to require a degree in project management just to report a broken button.

I wanted something simpler. So I built Squish.

Squish is a lightweight, web-based bug reporter built with PHP and MySQL. The idea is pretty straightforward: See a bug, capture it, mark it, describe it, and Squish it.

When I find something wrong, I can take a screenshot, upload it or paste it directly from my clipboard. Squish lets me mark up the image right in my browser, highlighting exactly what’s broken. No need to open another graphics program just to draw a circle around a problem.

I can attach up to three screenshots, give the bug a short description, and assign it to the application I’m working on. Squish automatically gives it a bug number so I can keep track of things without inventing my own filing system.

It even keeps the original screenshot along with my marked-up version, just in case I need to go back and see what things looked like before I started drawing all over them.

Everything goes onto a simple bug board. A problem is either OPEN or SQUISHED. That’s it. When the bug is fixed, I mark it SQUISHED, and the report stays around in case I need to reference it later.

I’m also using AI coding agents to help develop my applications, and screenshots make it a whole lot easier to show an agent exactly what’s wrong instead of trying to explain that the third button from the left is overlapping the thingamajig underneath it.

Eventually, I may tie Squish into FortiDude, my project development and planning system, so bug reports can become punchlist items. But I deliberately kept the two independent. Squish doesn’t need FortiDude, and it doesn’t need to grow into another complicated project-management application.

That’s really the whole point.

I didn’t want another system to manage. I wanted a quick way to point at something broken, explain what’s wrong, get it fixed, and move on.

Find it. Mark it. Fix it. SQUISH IT!