Flair Additions

So I made some improvements to my developer forum flair!

Firstly, I added a Sun Forums flair, which displays your username, number of posts, and number of Dukes.


The background image to the left changes depending on how many "Dukes" you have, which are like these special points you can get for answering questions. It will also put a star next to your name if you are a moderator.

This one was a little more complicated because I couldn't pass the HTML directly into a DOMDocument object like with JavaRanch. I had to use tidy to clean up the HTML before passing it to DOMDocument:

//tidy the page
$tidy = new tidy("http://forums.sun.com/profile.jspa?userID=$id");
$tidy->cleanRepair();
$tidy = preg_replace('/<\/?nobr>/', '', $tidy); //<nobr> tags must be removed for DOMDocument

//load the page
$html = new DOMDocument();
$html->loadHTML($tidy);

I also had to pretty much do all development on the mangst.com server because the PHP installation on my iMac doesn't have tidy installed and it doesn't support all of the GD graphics functions.

Secondly, I added the ability to view the flair as a dynamically created image (nerdgasm!!!). Just change the "type" parameter to "png" or "jpeg":

<img src="http://www.mangst.com/flair/sun?id=1071155&type=png" />

I was actually surprised how easy this was. I had this fear that generating an image programmatically would be hugely complicated, but it wasn't really. The hardest part was keeping track of the pixels to make sure everything lined up right. I tried to make it look as close as possible to the Javascript and HTML versions, but for some reason the bold version of Verdana comes out looking a lot less bold in the image.