X24 Designs

So now I am using php cURL for getting headers and other information for Tech Scraper.
Hopefully it works a little bit better.

I am however experiencing an interesting HTTP 3.01 error through cURL on some pages, so I wrote in some
counters to that and so it still uses file_get_contents($url) if cURL returns an HTTP 3.01 error.

I also split all output into arrays so I could keep track of output and use a statement if I could not return any information.

http://www.x24d.com/tech_scrape/

changes:

$ch = curl_init();
$options = array(
CURLOPT_URL => $url,
CURLOPT_HEADER => true,
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
CURLOPT_USERAGENT => "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U;
Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11)
Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11",
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true
);
curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
$AR_info = curl_getinfo($ch);
curl_close($ch);


So I found question on yahoo answers about a page that if you input a url it will come back with the languages and technology it uses.

Instead of looking for the page, I thought, hey that might be an interesting page! I’ll do that.

Thus this mini project was born:
http://www.x24d.com/tech_scrape/

Try it out!

Right now its pretty rough, but it does come up with some good material.
I’ll keep tweaking it and things.

-Ted

I found a horrible, yet very addictive (what a bad combination), time waster.

http://www.deathball.net/notpron

This is a game that is so hard, it took 3 friends of mine 3 hours to get to level 12 out of 182 levels!
The object of the game is to try to get the next page by any means necessary, short of cheating.

Good luck, and if you ever do beat it, tell me!
(because  I will never have the time to finish it.)

So I wrote a quasi-class for a shout box. I say quasi-class mostly because the class is really written for just this application. I have to go back and write it so that it can be expanded a little more. Anyway its free, free to use, free to modify, free to do whatever. Just keep my original creds in the php file?

This shoutbox runs off of PHP 5, if you need a PHP4 version just ask. Also if you have any feedback on what I could make better comment!

config.php file contains some constants that you will need to set to use the application. Try not to move things into different folders. If you do be sure to change the reference directory to the right path.

this is what it looks like:
You can view the admin section
username: admin
password: password

as you can see in the admin section, the e-mail address of the user who commented is visible.

Hope you like it!
I am thinking of writing one with a database connection, because I know if you have 2 people trying to write to the same file at once, it just doesn’t like it.

Resources:
» comment_box.zip

This is the truck from my vintage tutorial.

For this tutorial I am using the vintage truck from stock exchange:
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/935065

The first thing to do is to extract the truck from the background. Now there really isn’t a good way of extracting an image from a complex background like this. Fortunately we don’t really need to be very careful, because of the extra image effect we will use later. Try to get as close the truck as you can. Read the rest of this entry »

This also goes with the vintage tutorial.

So what is a blending mode?
Well I actually don’t know the technical term for it, so I just say that it’s
an effect that you can use on a layer to blend it with the preceding layers.

There really is no wrong way to use the tool, just play around with it! After
a while you will get the hang of it.

You will find it on the small tool bar in Photoshop 7+

Here you can do a lot of fun things, so just cycle through the modes and see what happens.

NOTE: Each change to your blending mode is a change to the document so keep that in mind because if you do to many changes to the document, you can’t undo them.