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5/22/2009 - Most of the generators are offline (again). I have to rewrite some of them (again). I'll get it back together as soon as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience (again).
Frequently Asked Questions
Questions about: Church Sign Generator
Click a question to see the answer.
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Sorry, I don't sell real signs, only imaginary ones. Let me repeat that: I write programs that make pictures of signs. I do not manufacture real, physical signs. Honestly, people. How much clearer can I be? (You'd be amazed at how many inquiries I get from people wanting an estimate for a real sign.) Try the folks over at Stewart Signs if you want a real one.
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It really just kind of grew on its own, I didn't set out from the beginning to make a website devoted to church signs. It started when I was driving home from work in my hometown (Austin, Texas) and seeing all the signs in front of churches around here. I thought they were funny, sometimes unintentionally funny, so I took a few pictures and put them on my blog. Then I took a few more, and a couple of people sent me pictures they had taken, so it made sense to have an entire page devoted to it instead of just unrelated blog entries. Then I came up with the church sign generator, and that was popular, and it made sense to move it all to its own site.
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The reason for the church sign generator was that some of the pictures people send me are obviously staged, where someone had purposely rearranged the letters on a church sign (usually to spell out something vulgar). One day for fun, I took one of the photos I had and pulled it into Photoshop and played around with the letters and made a couple of faked church sign photos, and that was funny. Then I had the idea that it might be cool to have a program that allowed you just to type in the letters you want and have it put them on the sign for you, so I wrote it and put it on my website, and told a few friends about it, and it took off from there.
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I'm afraid not. It's a good idea, and I've been approached by a few publishers, but for various technical and legal reasons, it's not feasible. There are plenty of good church sign books out there already, though.
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Maybe. With the exception of few photos I took personally, the photos in the Real Church Signs gallery were taken by others. I don't own them, I only display them on my site with their permission, so you'll have to get their permission for any other use. If there's no link or attribution, send me an e-mail and I'll do my best to put you in contact with the owner. As far as the photos I took personally (any photo attributed to "Ryland Sanders"), you have my permission to use them.
Questions about: Official Seal Generator
Click a question to see the answer.
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It varies, depending on what you type and the font you choose. There's no fixed number of characters, since the characters in a proportional font vary in width, but you have 360 degrees of arc to work with. Once you run out of arc, your text will simply be truncated and not printed on your seal.
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Absolutely. I'm adding more content over time, and I'm happy to take suggestions and user-contributed art. Art should be "camera ready", i.e. a black and white illustration, rather than a photo. It should also be 300 dpi or better, so I can use it in stickers and magnets. If you've got a suitable piece of art, send me a copy or tell me where I can find it, and I'll add it if I can.
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Sure, as long as it's a public and/or non-profit organization, and if their copyright/trademark policies will allow it. (No company or corporate logos, please - I'm not in the advertising business.) Also, keep in mind that once on the site, the logo will be available to anybody who uses the site, not just to you.
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I'm afraid there's not an upload feature planned at this time. It's possible I may add one in the future, but for various technical reasons, and more importantly for quality-control reasons, handling user uploads is pretty complicated.
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It depends. If it's something to make the generator easier to use or something relatively simple, I'll definitely consider it (and in fact, it may already be planned). However, the generator can only do so much before it ceases to be a generator and becomes a desktop publishing program. It was never meant to do everything, least of all replace human judgment. The generator is good enough if you want something simple and quick. If you want something that looks professionally designed, hire a professional designer.
Questions about: Says-It.com
Click a question to see the answer.
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Yes, it's yours to keep. You may not copyright or trademark your graphic, but you may copy it, print it, or distribute it without restriction. If you use it on a website, it would be nice if you could link back to me, but that's not required.
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I'm sorry to hear that; sometimes people use the generators to create images with offensive slogans on them and e-mail them to other people. I guarantee you it wasn't from me; I don't e-mail things to random strangers, much less pictures with bad words on them. Unfortunately, there's not much I can do about it. I can't control what people type when they use the generator, and I can't control what people e-mail to each other. That's the price you pay for free speech.
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It probably means you're using a firewall or proxy program, such as Norton Personal Firewall or ZoneAlarm, or that your network administrator or internet service provider has such a program running on your network. Those programs can intercept requests from your browser and strip out the referer information, generally in order to maintain your privacy (although stripping the referer header seems a bit paranoid, in my opinion).
I set the script to reject requests without the proper referer information, in order to make it harder to abuse the generators by hotlinking to a generated image instead of downloading it and storing it somewhere.
If you're using a firewall or proxy, try temporarily disabling it, or adding "says-it.com" and "churchsigngenerator.com" to your list of trusted sites.
If you're not using a firewall or proxy, or if you don't know what I'm talking about, try calling your network administrator or your internet service provider and asking them about it.
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Hotlinking means that you or someone you know tried to embed or link directly from your server (your website, blog, or forum posting, for example) to a generated image on says-it.com. I can't afford to allow that, as it unnecessarily increases the amount of traffic on the webserver, so I have blocked hotlinking.
You are free to copy your generated signs and host them on your site -- that is, you can download them to your computer and then upload them somewhere else, such as to your blog or forum if it allows it, or to a free image hosting service. Each generator has a button labeled "Host with ImageShack", so you can upload your image to ImageShack image hosting with one click.
I'm not trying to stop you using the images you make, I'm glad that people like them and I don't mind a bit if you want to use them, but you'll have to host them somewhere else so I don't have to pay for it, that's all.
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I don't mean to be surly, but I don't have the time or, frankly, the patience to teach you how to use your computer. Here are some general instructions; if your problem isn't covered here, take it up with your internet service provider, your network administrator, or the store where you bought your computer.
To save your image on your computer:
Option 1: Right-click on the image and choose "Save Picture As".
Option 2: Click the "Download to my computer" button below the image.
To e-mail your image to someone:
Option 1: Right-click on the image and choose "E-mail Picture".
Option 2: Click the "Host with ImageShack" button below the image, copy the address from the ImageShack results page and paste it into an e-mail message.
MSNTV/WebTV users: Click the "Host with ImageShack" button.
All the generators have been tested with all major browsers and e-mail programs, so if you have a problem saving or e-mailing your seal, it's probably not the generator - you're probably doing something wrong.
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My name is Ryland Sanders. I'm a web developer in Austin, TX, USA. My blog is here (caution, I sometimes use naughty words and talk about grown-up things). I've done some other projects, you can find them here. You can contact me here.
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I'm very busy with my own projects at the moment, so I'm afraid I can't take on anything new at this time.
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I'm afraid I have to say no. I've tried adding text and banner ad units in various configurations in addition to the Google ads, and they have invariably done poorly. They also tend to drive down my AdSense earnings, so they don't make money for me; in fact they often cost me more in AdSense earnings than they bring in.
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I've thought of doing that, and it wouldn't be that difficult on a technical level. The problem is that some of the things people put in are so vulgar that it wouldn't be worth dealing with the complaints from people who are offended. The way it is now, anybody can use it without being censored or being offended.
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That's a complex question; I can't answer it completely in this space, but here's an overview.
The Church Sign Generator, the ___ Says comic generators, Pave The Moon, and the Mobster Threat Generator use PHP with the GD graphics library to manipulate images; read the documentation for PHP's GD function wrappers for more info. The Concert Ticket Generator, Cassette Generator, Vinyl Record Generator, and Official Seal Generator use a Perl script with the Image::Magick Perl module to manipulate images. Both methods generally work in the same way, by compositing letters or other graphics onto a prepared background image.
The Church Sign Generator and Pave The Moon work by copying each letter from an image with only letters on it (that is, by copying a rectangular region containing each letter from the letters image) and compositing it onto a background image. The reason for this method (as opposed to simply drawing text using TrueType fonts) is so that I could apply pixel effects (shading, color variations, beveling, etc.) in Photoshop that couldn't easily be done dynamically.
The ____ Says generators and the Mobster Threat Generator work in 3 stages; stage one is where a pose image (a cut-out image of the famous person in question, contained in a PNG file with a transparent background) is composited on top of a background image. Stage two is drawing the speech/thought balloon using functions to draw graphics primitives (circles, rectangles, etc.). Stage three is to add the text using a TrueType font.
The Cassette Generator, Vinyl Record Generator, and Official Seal Generator work in the same basic way; text and graphics are composited on a prepared background image. The only difference is that some elements are graphics (the Says Records logo, for example), but you can choose different colors for them. In order to render these elements, it's necessary to composite them onto the background using a grayscale PNG as an alpha transparency mask, kind of like a stencil.
The Concert Ticket Generator is the simplest of all the generators; it just composites text onto a background image in one stage, using a TrueType font (the Fake Receipt font, which mimics a dot matrix printer). All other elements in the image are static, part of the background image.
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I've released the source for two example generators; you can download the package here. The package contains HTML forms, the generator scripts themselves, and the base images and fonts used by the scripts. It's released under the GNU General Public License, version 2, so feel free to copy it and use it on your site. Keep in mind that you'll need PHP, Perl, and the latest version of ImageMagick installed on your server for the generators to work.
If you use the code, I only ask two things:
- Use your own source images - don't make another church sign generator, make your own thing.
- Don't ask me to explain it or tell you how to implement it on your site. The code is well-commented, and documentation is readily available online. (I also highly recommend a book called Perl Graphics Programming, written by Shawn Wallace and published by O'Reilly.) In particular, don't send me e-mail that starts out, "I know you said you don't do support, but..." because these e-mails will be deleted unread. I'm sorry if this seems curmudgeonly, but I don't have the time or the patience these days to deal with people who are trying to learn programming - these are not scripts for beginners.
The coding is the easy part, really; coming up with a good idea and preparing the source graphics are the tough parts of the process.
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If your site is in some way related to mine (relevant to the content of a particular generator, based on my code, etc.), I'll take a look at it and let you know. Otherwise, I have to say no.
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Yes, if you live in one of the following countries:
Afghanistan, Aland Islands, Albania, Algeria, American Samoa, Andorra, Angola, Anguilla, Antarctica, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Armenia, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bermuda, Bhutan, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Bouvet Island, Brazil, British Indian Ocean Territory, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Cape Verde, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, Chad, Chile, China, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Colombia, Comoros, Congo, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Cote d'Ivoire, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, England, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Falkland Islands (Malvinas), Faroe Islands, Fiji, Finland, France, French Guiana, French Polynesia, French Southern Territories, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Gibraltar, Great Britain, Greece, Greenland, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guam, Guatemala, Guernsey, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Heard and McDonald Islands, Holy See (Vatican City State), Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Isle of Man, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jersey, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Korea, Republic of, Korea, South, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macao, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Marshall Islands, Martinique, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mayotte, Mexico, Micronesia, Moldova, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Montserrat, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Niue, Norfolk Island, Northern Ireland, Northern Mariana Islands, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Pitcairn, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Reunion, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Saint Barthelemy, Saint Helena, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Martin (French part), Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Samoa, San Marino, Sao Tome and Principe, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Sudan, Suriname, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Syrian Arab Republic, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tokelau, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, U.S. Minor Outlying Islands, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Vietnam, Virgin Islands, U.K., Virgin Islands, Wales, Wallis and Futuna, Western Sahara, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
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