Server move, ugly site

Gave up GoDaddy for DreamHost. (that’s a referral link).  During the move, a lot of files may have been misplaced or even lost, links to certain pages may be dead, etc. I also haven’t updated the theme yet, so it’s back to WordPress default for a bit.

Events sites, Developer APIs

These might come in handy very soon:

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/services/api/

http://corporate.zvents.com/developers/

http://api.eventful.com/

Does http://going.com have one? I sure don’t see it.

Know of a site similar to the ones offering the above APIs? Let me know.

Signed Cookies in PHP

I saw the Signed Cookies in Django Middleware and looked around to see if something like that had been done in PHP. I didn’t see anything immediately – perhaps some of the frameworks have it buried in their docs somewhere?

So I put together a small class that handles cookie signing, and verification, for PHP.

It’s nothing very serious, and could probably be vastly improved – but I like going the route of “absolutely minimal”, so that you could quickly grab the concepts and put them to practice in whatever code-base you’re working on.

UPDATE:
In the time since writing this, I seem to have misplaced the specific portion of code that I had laying around. In the mean time, I highly suggest checking out this answer about signed cookies at StackOverflow, which should cover all of the basics to get you started, should you choose to take that route.

Claymation Christmas Special – with Dinosaurs and California Raisins

Claymation Christmas Special – with Dinosaurs and California Raisins:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00009WHRM/bookstorenow50-20

I watched this as a kid. “Waffle-ing” is forever burned in my mind. Like others, I remember that the sand/stained-glass scene was my least favorite. I wasn’t sure if anyone else had ever heard of or seen this.

GIMP, Photoshop, Digital Scrapbooking

To start, if you already use GIMP, here’s a interesting link to “1000+ FREE High Resolution GIMP Brushes“. I haven’t checked ‘em all, but some of them look great. If you’re not already familiar with GIMP, read on…

So, Digial Scrapbooking is cool, and apparently pretty big. I don’t do scrapbooking, but my wife does, and I’m so excited that she asks all kinds of great questions about Photoshop now, etc.

Before you go looking, the industry standard Photoshop product is $699. For casual, even “advanced” (sorry, I’m not sure what word your culture uses!) scrapbookers, that price can be extremely steep – especially considering that the full featured product is overkill, with many features that (I imagine) most scrapbook projects will never use.

Adobe does have a related product, Photoshop Elements, which is scaled down, and probably a closer-to-perfect fit for most scrapbookers. I believe they even sell this edition at Walmart, etc, for around $139.99.

However great those products are, I’m mostly here to point out some competition: GIMP (Wikipedia).

GIMP is a freely available alternative to other “graphics manipulation software”. For those on a tight budget, or that just like to be thrifty, GIMP is a very capable choice.

I’m no professional GIMP user (rather, I’m often in Photoshop) but I’m interested in helping others jump in on the free (and open-source) software options. If you’re interested in using GIMP, or you know of any interesting uses already, related to scrapbooking or otherwise, I’m interested to hear about it.

If you know the address, send me an email. Otherwise, find someone that knows how to get in contact with me. We’ll see if the whole six degrees thing really works.

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