From Zend.com this morning, we have a new tutorial taht talks about making graphs and charts and all without having to dive all the way into GD. Now, I know what you're thinking - and yes, it does still use the GD libraries. But it also uses the JpGraph libraries to act as a "wrapper" around GD to make your life tons easier. In this article they give you some good examples for all kinds of graphs (bar, line, pie, etc) and the code that makes them. You can even add titles, colors and a legend, all through this software. So, if you've been looking for an easy way to get a dynamic graph or chart for your website, look no further, and be sure to check this article out.

And, going right along with that story (I think they planned it - it's all one big conspiracy - heh), we have a new story from Evolt.org about creating dynamic thumbnails with PHP. This stuff also uses the GD libraries, but in a completely different way. They give you a pretty nice little script that you can just feed options, like filename, new height and width, and what kind of image it is. They put a bit of a new twist on it though. Most people, when they think of thumbnails, they think of thumbnail files residing on a machine, premade. But, this script actually takes a url (like http://www.example.com/img.php?f(3cb7f702a5967)+w(300)) and grabs the correct image and resizes it on the fly. It's a pretty processor intensive task, but I suppose as long as you're not getting tons of images per page, the load time shouldn't be too bad...

And, lastly this morning, there's an interesting interview over on SitePoint's website this morning - with Jeffrey Zeldman of A List Apart. It's not just one of those "look at me, I'm a cool web designer" articles that so many sites publish. They do talk about his past websites and his passions about web design, but they also talk some about web standards and things like the WaSP project that tried to convince browser makers to raise the bar on the standards that their browsers supported. They also finish the article off with some good tips in general for web designers out there to follow (which some people out there seem to have lost sight of).