Cory Borrow has posted a tutorial he's created to show how to harness the power of PHP and GD to create thumbnail images out of the contents of a text file.

Today, I'll give a little info on how to achieve the process of creating a thumbnail using PHP, GD and the text from a text file. It is really pretty simple, so lets get started.

The trick behind the translation is in reading in the contents of the (plain) text file and pushing it into a string value of a newly created GD-generated image. He includes the code to make using it in your own app simple (a cut and paste version) - his method FileToThumb.

In an effort to get streams more out in the, er, mainstream, Wez Furlong has posted an example of some code for a common operation many use cURL for - posting to a remote script - but with streams.

Every time I search for the code snippet that allows you to do an HTTP POST request, I don't find it in the manual and resort to reading the source. So, here's an example of how to send a POST request with straight up PHP, no cURL.

The example uses stream_context_create, fopen, stream_get_contents and an Exception to send off the message from an inputted array to the remote server. Smaller things, like the Content-length header on the request, are automatically handled by the wrapper functionality. You can check out this page for more information on the wrapper functionality.

On the Zend Developer Zone today, there's an interview with the co-authors of the recently released book from php|architect, the Zend Certification Study Guide.

The new Zend Certification Study Guide is out and the initial reviews look good. Since this was a topic of interest to me (mainly because I've yet to take the test) I decided to dig a little deeper. I fired up my recorder and called Davey Shafik and Ben Ramsey, the authors of the new guide, to talk to them. Here to give you a little of the back story is our conversation.

They talk about:

• the release of the book
• some of the contents of the chapters (including the sample chapter on security)
• Davey's experience with the exam/Ben's use of his PHP4 certification in his work
• and the practice tests that php|architect is offering to get developers prepared.

Sometimes, it's just not enough to sit and try to teach theory about something in programming - it's better to just jump right in and take things as they come. That's what Harry Fuecks thinks, at least in his latest post on the SitePoint PHP Blog - a look at the "Joy of Regular Expressions".

He does go over a bit of the theory and why they are so invaluable, but it's a short section before he gets to the heart of the article - working with regular expressions for:

• positive matching
• matching all instances in a given string
• finding an exact match
• matching the start of a string
• validation of the contents of a string
• checking the length of a string