joey nelson blog title

I’d been having a lot of trouble getting my Ubuntu machine to render TTFs with GD in PHP. So much trouble that I’d even tried crazy things like recompiling PHP. Luckily I found this post on excitris.com and I was able to solve all of my problems with one line of code. Since the code on their site is completely mangled, here it is:

putenv('GDFONTPATH=' . realpath('.'));

Now I can use dynamic text replacement without going insane.

The Snap blog has launched and pretty much all hell has broken loose. Anyone who signs up can post to the blog with their “launch idea” and it will automatically get posted on the front page. Then other users can vote on the best ideas, and the winner gets $5,000. How could THAT go wrong?

I wrote several plugins for the blog, and it seems like the company is excited about releasing them to the public. This is pretty much the first significant stuff I’ve done with PHP and I really got to dig around in the guts of Wordpress to add some cool features:

Simple Vote
Adds a Digg-style vote box to posts from a certain category. Only registered users can vote.

Simple Post
Allows any user to post to the blog from a watered down interface, regardless of their privileges. Crazy, right? This way we can let users post to the blog without giving them access to anything in the admin interface.

Easy Author Info
Easily grab any author’s information. For example, you could print out any author’s “About me” text like this:

echo get_easyauthor_attr($author_id, "description");

These scripts need to be cleaned up and made more configurable before they can be released, but hopefully that should be pretty soon.

Compare my open letter to singer/songwriters from a few weeks ago with Xeni Jardin’s recent post on boingboing: Free MP3: folk cover of Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise”. Man, she really sucks.