I’ve been having a lot of fun playing around with the GD library off and on for the past couple of days. For those that don’t know, GD is the standard image treatment library that comes with most installed distributions of PHP. Ultimately, I’m trying find a decent background image for the abstractmachine homepage, but so far have yet to find anything that catches my fancy. So as usual, when in doubt, make it random!
Coding images on the server probably isn’t the best workflow, but it actually works out fine for me. It also allows me to mashup all my data on the server directly without having to later change anything. My FTP program and BBEdit make the whole process transparent: I just write the code in BBEdit, save, and refresh the page in one of the various browsers to see the results.
GD isn’t Processing, not by a longshot. But it’s actually quite pleasant to play with basic image building blocks, and I do so love programming in PHP. Variables and arrays are so easy, although I still don’t like the whole dollar $ign stuff. I left that world back in 1991. I’m a €uro man now. (ok, bad joke)