International PHP Conference 2001

The International PHP Conference is the conference for PHP developers. Held in Frankfurt, Germany, the conference is presented in English and German. I had the delightful task of explaining PHP's excellent image management features.

The following description of my presentation is from the PHP Conference site.

   Dynamic Image Generation for Web Sites

A picture is worth a thousand words and the up to date currency charts at yahoo.com are worth thousands of dollars to frequent travellers planning when and how they will pay for their travel.

Can you make your web page worth more than a thousand words? Yes!

When do you make an image dynamic and when static? Where do you place the data, and where do you place the generation code? Why is JPEG or PNG or PDF or Flash? All these questions and more, answered with maps, illustrations and live, working example code.

Feedback

My audience was the largest audience in the conference with people standing many rows deep. The only close competitor was the panel session where people gave away lots of software and books. The rush of requests for my contact information indicated a huge response to this topic and my recommendations.

Most people had looked at image control using software outside their Web server. Few had attempted anything within a live Web server other than a simple image file upload. The general feedback was that my examples had expanded their view of what is possible and had shown them ways to do things they had long wanted to do but did not know where to start.

My practical detail answered most people's questions. They did not know what to do and had always imagined this sort of task as being massive. They expected this type of work to require the most expensive hardware and software. I showed them easy ways to complete all the work on inexpensive computers using free software.

The audience was happy to find that there are solutions to their problems. When they then found out the solutions are cheap and easy, the audience broke out in to applause.

Professional Speaking

There are times when you want a speaker with a deep technical understanding of the topic you want explained. Not many people with a deep technical understanding can present a topic in a useful manner.

I often train presenters before a conference. Unfortunately many conferences leave the presentation training until too late and then limit the training to the operation of a microphone and a laser pointer. If you want a good presentation, start your training at least a week before the conference. I have the advantage of both the technical knowledge and the prior training as a professional speaker.

When you want technology presented to an audience, consider hiring a professional speaker with expertise in the appropriate field. Your audience will absorb far more relevant information from a great presentation than they will absorb from a technical person with no presentation skills or experience.

PHP Image Management

You can get my presentation from the conference Web site. A better approach is to send your Web site address to me and describe the image management you want for the site. PHP has a rich variety of functions for changing images. Coupling those functions to some of PHP's other features will give you the easiest and cheapest way to manage images within a Web site.

You can then automate many of the tasks required to build image intensive web sites. My presentation featured dynamically built images of the type you can use in Web sites for travel, medicine, weather, news, finance, retail, wholesale, and manufacturer's product descriptions. The results are far more useful and far less labour intensive. You save money and sell more.