|
|
Frequently Asked QuestionsLast updated on Wednesday, December 19, 2007 Questions about the Church Sign Generator
Questions about the Official Seal Generator
Questions about the Church Sign GeneratorI need an estimate for a sign for my church. How much do you charge? 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. (back to top) Where did you get the idea? Why church signs? 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 churchs 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. (back to top) How did you come up with the church sign generator? 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. (back to top) Are you going to do a church sign book? 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. (back to top) Can I use a photo in the Real Church Signs gallery in my book/magazine? 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. (back to top) Questions about the Official Seal GeneratorHow much text can I enter? 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 about 350 degrees of arc to work with. Once you run out of arc, your text will simply be truncated and not printed on your seal. (back to top) The emblem I want isn't in there. Can you add another emblem? 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. (back to top) Can you add a logo for my organization? 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. (back to top) Can I upload an image to use on my seal? 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. (back to top) Can you add a feature that does (such-and-such)? 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 judgement. The generator is good enough if you want something simple and quick. If you want something that looks professionally designed, hire a professional designer. General QuestionsCan I use the image I generate on my website? (or on my letterhead, or in my magazine, or whatever) Yes, it's yours to keep, you can use it for any purpose (as long as it's not illegal) 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. (back to top) Someone just sent me an image from your site with something really offensive written on it. 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. (back to top) What does this mean: Error: posting from external URLs isn't allowed. 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. (back to top) What does this mean: Stealing bandwidth makes baby Jesus cry. Don't hotlink my images. 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. (back to top) I'm having trouble saving the image (or e-mailing the image, or uploading the image to my website, or operating my computer...) Can you help? 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.
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. (back to top) Who runs this site? 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. (back to top) Can you do a custom generator for me / help me with my project? 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. (back to top) Can I place a text ad or banner ad on your site? 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. Why don't you show the last 10 or so signs that other people have generated? That would be fun, wouldn't it? 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. (back to top) How do these image generators work? 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. (back to top) Are you going to release the source code? I've released the source for the Church Sign Generator; you can download it here (as well as an example base sign image and characters image). It's released under the GNU General Public License, so feel free to copy it and use it on your site. I only ask two things:
As for the other generators, I don't have any plans to release any more source code for them, but all of them are conceptually the same as the Church Sign Generator, so any moderately skilled PHP or Perl hacker will be able to adapt the ideas I've already described. 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. (back to top) Will you link to my site? Would you be interested in a link exchange? 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. (back to top) |
