There and Back Again

Updated
WebThumb added a new feature this week called Easythumb. Like the rest of webthumb its still in beta but it makes adding thumbnails too a site much easier.

Easythumb gives you a simple interface to WebThumb letting people with minimal PHP skills integrate WebThumb into there site. It does have a couple drawbacks, thumbnails are always cached (if someone else requested that same url within 24 hours then you get that thumb instead of making a new request), the output sizes are smaller, and some other options won’t be available.

Easythumb lets you generate a thumbnail using an normal http GET call, letting you put the request right in an img src. Easythumb thumbs are always cached, the default cache is 1 day, you can also use a 7 day and 30 day cache.

If a thumbnail is served from the cache it only use 1/5 of a credit
If the thumbnail is generated it uses 1 credit like normal

Note that currently Easythumb only generates thumbnails of sizes small, medium, and medium2

I have a small example script that shows Easythumbs usage it uses a little JavaScript trick to add a loading message. To use it on your site you just need to register a webthumb account. Copy this sample where you want it and update the parameters.

My slides from last nights azPHP presentation are now available. Feel free to post a comment if you have any questions.

I’ll be giving a talk about Jquery at the azPHP meeting tomorrow. If your in the Phoenix area you should come to the meeting, its at Walt Tv in Tempe at 7pm. azPHP meetings are a great place to meet fellow PHP developers and this month to learn some neat AJAX tricks.

Since im at a Web Design Firm these days I get to work on a lot of interesting smaller projects. One of my tasks has been to help launch BestPartyEvery.com. I didn’t get to do much on the development side just a bit of cleanup, and some code reviews which has been interesting.

bpe uses jQuery for the JavaScript effects, which is a library I haven’t looked at before, but that has a very nice well documented API. I’ve been using jQuery in a couple other projects so chances are you’ll see it show up in a couple articles soon.

I started writing the HTML_AJAX manual tonight, I didn’t get that far but it felt good to be at it again.

Anyhow this writing is more public (and hopefully a lot shorted) then my last project so anyone who is interested can take a gander right now. Its over on the HTML_AJAX wiki. I haven’t done any editing yet so feel free to fix anything I mispelled.

Oh and the first couple sections are just about AJAX in general, so the 60 second read might interest you even if you don’t use HTM_AJAX.

I got up early to vote before work, the lines weren’t that bad but something got messed up in my registration process so I had to vote on a provisional ballot.

For some reason they had me marked as having recieved an early ballot. 2 years ago I used an online service to signup for my ballot while in London, I wonder if those guys did the really annoying thing of automatically signing me up for another one.

I started a new job today at obuweb. Today was the y the standard stuff of a first day at a new place. It was great to be working on something new. I’m also looking forward to the smaller scope of the projects i’ll be starting with. Its not that I don’t enjoy a challenge but not im happy to not be working on the same code every single day, like I’ve been doing for the last 2 years.