My VWD Lottery Experience.

I was playing with some script today, I edited the custom hotpocket flyer and adapted it so it would work with a dvd covering letter.

I got everything working but the file was over 5mb in size when it was finished and well, that’s a big file to send by email! I went out a-searchin’ and found some classes for zipping things up which was quite cool, I spent a couple of hours learning how they worked and inserted them into the code and tested it…poo, not enough memory on my host to zip up a 5mb file. arrrgh!

I logged into the control panel of the hosting ready to send a support email requesting more memory allocation and while I was waiting for the page to load I thought I would try and reduce the file size of the document first. There is a picture at the top of the file and that is what was causing the chunky part of the file. First I removed the picture and uploaded the slim file and the script worked, it made the file, compressed it, deleted the temp file and emailed the completed zip to the correct address. Great, the program works, while I was doing the “I’m a programmer me!” dance I realised that a big part of the documents picture was 2 lines of text which could easily be replaced with ‘real’ text. a copy, snip, crop, edit, save later and now my document was down to 102kb. how nice.

turns out I needn’t have bothered with learning how to zip things up! I learned a lot though and now I can zip things on the fly with php (not flies though apparently)

This happens a lot with me, I encounter a problem and spend a while coming up with (IMO) an elegant solution by going off and a-learnin’ something new that will do it. I spend a few hours in a kind of bliss as I solve the problem with something I’ve never used before and (nearly always) come up with a working solution only to find out that I needn’t have bothered because all you gotta do is “click here”.

oh, almost forgot …. the subject!
the link to the custom dvd covering letter