Creating images on-the-fly can be a very useful skill. Using PHP’s built-in image generation functions, it’s pretty easy, too. This tutorial will detail how to have the titles of blog entries show up as automatically generated images.

There are several ad sites that you’ll see being used everywhere. They slow down page loading, even on fast connections, because sometimes there’ll be lag and they won’t load immediately and instead of being able to read that interesting news article, you’re stuck waiting for some Flash animation to show up so you can ignore it. A simple way to make those ads 1) not show up and 2) not cause delays in page loading is to edit /etc/hosts. Check out hostsfile.mine.nu for ways of doing this in Windows and Mac.