Just for you Lively early adopters out there, there's a script that's been posted to the International Stock Exchange forum showing how to get a feed into the virtual world.

Here is a free PHP script to convert the titles of a news feed to a PNG graphic for display in Google Lively. To display a news feed in Google Lively, go to the "Add object" button, search for "Picture Frame". Click on add to room and then edit properties. In Gadget Options place the url of the PHP script in the option box.

The script can then be hosted on a web server where it can pull down the latest stories and update the PNG image accordingly.

On php|architect's C7Y community site Scott MacVicar has posted a new comparison of two of the main graphics platforms available to PHP - the GD and Imagick extensions.

If you want user interaction on your website then you probably accept the upload of some media, including images. Within PHP there are two different libraries available that provide functionality for handling images, GD and the Imagick extension. This article takes a brief look at each of these libraries.

Since GD comes bundled with PHP these days, he gives a brief installation tutorial for the Imagick extension. After that he compares the two with code for three different bits of functionality - identifying image types, working with EXIF data and modifying a current image (change format/resize).

The IBM developerWorks site has a new tutorial posted (registration/login required) talking about image creating in PHP using the GD library.

The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how to get started with the GD library and to provide a variety of techniques you can apply to your Web-page coding. The tutorial doesn't cover every GD function, but it teaches you the basics. The Resources section provides Web sites where you can learn more about using the GD library.

They go through the creation of sample images, working with gradients and lines, adding text, saving the image data out to a file and how to work with existing graphics to modify them.

Vinu Thomas has posted about a PHP/GD CAPTCHA solution he's come across - Secureimage.

From the company's description:

Securimage is an open-source free PHP CAPTCHA script for generating complex images and CAPTCHA codes to protect forms from spam and abuse. It can be easily added into existing forms on your website to provide protection from spam bots. It can run on most any webserver as long as you have PHP installed, and GD support within PHP.

Features of the tool include simple addition and validation methods, the ability to make audible CAPTCHAs and True Type font support. You can download the software from the project's website.

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.

Kore Nordmann has written up some benchmarks of some of the more popular PHP image creation libraries testing their output times and results for generating the same image.

In my article series I showed several ways on how to create images with PHP, going into implementation details etc. Now I just want to provide a very rough overview on speed and quality of the extensions.

He ran them with some settings disabled to optimize things as they ran and came up with results pointing to Cairo being the fastest to generate and output the image. It also had the benefit of outputting an image with the highest quality of the five tested (Cairo, SVG, Flash and GD with and without supersampling). His benchmark code is also included.

In a new tutorial today from DevShed, they introduce you to one of the more powerful bits of PHP functionality - the graphics manipulation functions - and how to use them to create an image generator class in PHP5.

In simple terms, over the course of this brand new PHP series, which will be comprised of three friendly tutorials, I'll walk you through the development of an easy-to-follow PHP class that will have the ability to build dynamic text strings, which will be outputted straight to the browser in the form of image streams.

This part part of the series lays the foundation, creating the basic structure of the class and the buildImageStream and displayImage methods. This is then used in a sample use - creating images, white text on a black background.

As mentioned in this Secunia advisory today, rPath has release updates to several packages today including a few PHP ones and GD library updates.

rPath has issued an update for gd and multiple php packages. This fixes some vulnerabilities, where some have an unknown impact and others can potentially be exploited to cause a DoS (Denial of Service).

The update is marked as "moderately critical" so it's recommended that users update their installations as soon as possible. You can find out more information and get the links to download the packages from the original advisory post.

DevShed concludes their series on using the GD graphics libraries in PHP with thie new article focusing on the use of some of the simple filtering functionality the library has to offer.

In this article I'm going to demonstrate how the GD library can be used to apply some basic graphic filters (yes, like Photoshop, but much simpler) by utilizing the versatility of a brand new function called "imagefilter()". As you'll see shortly, with this function it is possible to reverse, blur and highlight the colors of a determined image, as well as convert it to its grayscale version, among other things.

They use the imagefilter function in a few different examples - altering the colors in an image, working with contrast and brightness and various other filters (like smoothing, embossing, blurring and colorizing).

DevShed has posted part four of their series looking at the creation of graphics in PHP using the GD functionality. They take things a step further from the previous part and show how to create more complex shapes.

They show how to create things like:

• filled images and arcs
• filled polygons
• grabbing information the incoming image (like with the getimagesize function).