It would have been quite a bit easier to outline what a cat should do if I were, in fact, a cat. As it happens though, I am not a cat, not even a little bit of a cat. Labelling myself as a “cat person” may have confused you there but this was just to say that I think cats are great animals, fantastic pets and one of the few animals that, if nothing else, make hilarious video montages.

My JavaScript Cat’s requirements aren’t going to come from the mind of a cat, requirements that I expect wouldn’t be much more than:

1. Find nice sunny window-sill to sleep on
2. No matter where I am, arrive home and start meowing when owner rattles the cat biscuit box
3. Attack own shadow, fall off bench, jump ridiculously high at unexpected noises or something similarly comedic when a video camera is around

No, my JavaScript Cat will be modelled on what I have observed of these domesticated felines and… actually, scrap that. My observations include all of the points listed above, maybe I am a cat?

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Just a quick entry here to advise an improvement made to my Blog Promotion Tool.

I realised, as I was placing examples of the dynamic images all over the place, that server load may increase with all this image manipulation work being carried out by PHP. The image_factory now caches all files it creates and simply loads the cached image if all parameters and content are the same. When the content for the feed that you get your dynamic comes from changes, all cached images will be deleted so that you aren’t clogging up storage space.

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As I was laying the foundations for my JavaScript Cat I found myself in a little quandary, (excuse the oximoron as quandaries are not usually little) and a quandary is not a very nice place to be. I realised that I was creating this cat for the amusement of myself and others but without a way of getting the word out there, no one will know when I’ve added further developments to my scripted feline.

I decided to play around with something I haven’t used as often as I would like and use PHP, the GD Module and XML/RSS to create a dynamic billboard that I could deploy quickly and easily. Of course it would have to be a one-time only deployment because I am notoriously lazy; the rest should be done for me.
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