Trastan's making Zune ID cards for Zunerama members

[Zunerama Ed.]

Just wanted to highlight this thread going on in our Community Center:

http://zunerama.com/forum/index.php?topic=10420.0

Here's my ID card:



Thanks, Trastan!

[Blackie]

Awesome! Thanks Trastan!

[Trastan]

Sure, glad to help! Here's hoping we get a more official option in the near future.

[Zunerama Ed.]

Blogged it. Thanks, Trastan - great work.

[RL]

We have been getting a lot of link love lately.  MS Channel 10 has blogged this.

Here's the link..............

http://on10.net/blogs/sarahintampa/Zune-ID-Cards/

Grats Trastan.

Makes me wonder though, if we couldn't make an application to take care of the manual work.  May look into it this weekend.

[Trastan]

Thanks, RL - Harvey actually pointed that out to me earlier. Pretty cool.

I agree, it'd be great if we could get this process automated, but I'm afraid it's a bit beyond my current coding skills. If you have a way to help me get that going, I'd be much obliged.

[Zunerama Ed.]

^ If such a thing is feasible, we could host it from the Zunerama site - and perhaps dedicate one of our static pages to it. "Trastan's Zune ID Card Generator" page...?

One thing I like about how Trastan is doing it now, is we all get to see the requests coming in as well as the finished ID cards that Trastan produces. That is fun.

[RL]

Actually, Harvey that's an even better idea.  It might even be easier to actually to code it with html and javascript.  I was thinking along the idea of a dedicated application, but having a webapp do it would be better.   Probably beyond my skills at this point, but would be a fun project to play with over the next couple of weeks.  Of course if anyone else can pull it off, they are more than welcome to.

[Blackie]

Methinks there will be tons of these ID cards floating around...

[Vipralion]

Now I don't have the blank card or anything but what I did was create a tiny and very rough demo showing that it's possible with PHP!

Obviously if I went forward with this I'd polish it to make sure the PHP generated cards are as close in quality to what can be done manually by Trastan.

http://vipralion.net/zune/creation.php

[RL]

Perfect............now we just need to get Trastan to send you his graphical assets and Harvey to host it.

[Zunerama Ed.]

Ahh, our resident PHP guru strikes again! That's cool, Vipralion.

[Vipralion]

I've updated the demo with a familiar interface. Also configured the script to actually save the image to a file, which can be saved on the server for others to view so as to keep the ability to see the Zune ID Cards of others much the same as you do now in that particular thread. Would only need to have a script written to browse through the Zune ID's that have been created and also offer an easy means to delete cards one by one, and in bulk, keeping only the genuine ones, and discarding test cards, etc.

Still need to see if I can work on making the generated text less prone to the boogers it gets now.

Feel free to try out the web app. Let me know if you experience any bugs. All I need is to add Trastan's blank cards and add a chunk of code to handle creating horizontal and vertically oriented cards.

[Trastan]

Much obliged, Vipralion! Looks great so far. I'm curious: how did you do it? You said you used a webapp? I've worked with HTML, CSS, and some Javascript, but I've not yet touched those. I'd love to learn how you did it; would you mind sharing your wisdom? 

[Vipralion]

I didn't use a web app, I created the web app, which is more or less just a script. You can at the most, place text on top of an image using HTML, CSS, and Javascript but the image is still separate from the text. What I used is PHP with the functionality of the the GD function library to directly write the text onto the image itself. I used the imagettftext() function to use a custom font in TrueType format (.ttf) and then used a few other functions to load the template image and then output the bits in PNG format as it results in clearer text than when using the JPG format with GD.

HTML and CSS are simply markup languages and don't contain any programmatic functionality. Javascript can do some things but is limited to the environment inside your browser at which point it can be a security risk and so is limited by the browser in its functionality. PHP runs on the server side and does its work first, then sends the results to the client. It's best suited for web development and is a common choice when writing software such as these forums. It's also a great choice as it's easy to learn yet offers a vast amount of functionality for advanced programmers.