Archive January 2009

Obama Stencil Effect

January 30, 2009 in Design

Brief Background
My main source of insertion for the Inauguration Poster came from the Shepard Fairey “Hope” Poster we have all seen so much of. This is a quick tutorial on how I created the stencil effect for the poster.

3 comments

Learning Outcomes: Interacting with the Flickr API using PHP

January 29, 2009 in Learning Outcomes, Web Development

Many of the sites we build feature a small photo gallery as part of their design. Rather than roll our own photo management solution, we opted to integrate Flickr into our custom site framework.

1 comment

Reactive tree caching

January 27, 2009 in PHP

APC is an amazing tool for increasing the performance of PHP scripts. The framework we’re developing makes extensive use of caching to store complex data structures that would be too resource intensive to rebuild often. A lot of template engines produce static files to cache the output of resource intensive database driven systems. This works great but we wanted more flexibility.

5 comments

Learning Outcomes: Compiling Shibboleth-2.1 on FreeBSD 7.0 From Source

January 16, 2009 in Learning Outcomes, Unix

Shibboleth is a Internet2 single sign-on initiative. We were looking into using it to provide authentication services for some of our campus users. Unfortunately they don’t officially support the FreeBSD platform (only Cent-OS and RedHat). They do however provide instructions for compiling the software from source. The first thing you need to do is start compiling the multiple dependencies that Shibboleth will require.

9 comments

Getting Wordpress Working on Shell

January 10, 2009 in Web Development

UPDATE: Jeremy Blanchard has written an awesome shell script that will compile and install wordpress for you on your shell account. Check it out here: http://wiki.auzigog.com/Wordpress_on_shell.uoregon.edu

Getting Wordpress working on Shell is slightly more complicated than normal, but still fairly straightforward. The two important hurdles are getting PHP and MySQL working.