I am investigating ANOTHER new feature for my website, I'm quite industrious lately. I want to make it so that users can create custom themes for the site so that it can be whatever colours they like. This is pretty easy to do with CSS, but the fact that I have an image makes things a bit trickier.

I looked into dynamic image generation with PHP and found that I could do a good enough job. So, I made this little tester page that lets you enter choices for the four main colours on my site and then you get to see the image that is generated by those choices. Feel free to play with it, and if you create something that looks nice you can copy the address in the browser and send it to me. I may add it to a list of predefined themes if I like it.

At some point I will need to make code that writes cookies for user themes and also lets you switch themes and stuff, but that stuff isn't as interesting as the image creation so it might not happen right away.

I wish the school would change how PHP is compiled on its servers just a little bit. If they would link in the FreeType libraries I could have anti-aliased text in my dynamic images. That would be very sweet indeed.