Many developers spend time writing code designed to extract a very specific number of words or characters from a piece of text. This text sample, often drawn from a blog post or comment, is usually displayed with a link that leads the user to read more.
It’s possible to use JavaScript, CSS and server-side languages to create text extracts. For the purposes of this article, I’ll use PHP.
It may seem counter-intuitive to use anything other than CSS or PhotoShop to resize images: why on earth would you rescale an image with a server-side technique when the same could be done easily and quickly with a modification to the image’s width and height in your code?
The need for a server-side image resize will often occur when you are interacting with a service external to your own site: an API that requests an image in a particular size and format, for example. Another possibility is file uploads: if you allow users to upload images to your site, you’ll want to be sure they are scaled and cropped to specific dimensions. Under such circumstances, CSS is useless: the image must be the right size and format before it is used. Another good example is social media sites’ request for a thumbnail image to associate with a web page or blog post, during a “share” or “like” action.
Every installation of PHP makes an assumption about where it is on planet Earth. PHP does not read the location information from the computer it is installed on: that would be the role of JavaScript. Instead, every web server installation defaults to a pre-determined timezone. It is likely that this default won’t match the actual physical location of the server. For example, if you’ve downloaded and installed XAMPP, the server assumes its local timezone is Berlin, Germany.
