I found a cool wee site at http://www.imageresizer.co.uk/ that basically does exactly what i would like to do on the wallpaper site i am building, namely offering a easy way to resize images quickly on the fly and still have them looking great after the resize. Looking at the source code & php of that site i cant see where the "magic" occurs, where the resizing is occurring... how do they do the resizing, i dont see for example any php calls..? I am a relative newbie to anything past normal html =)
PHP has a suite of "GD" image manipulation tools. Start here: http://www.php.net/gd I have a script to create animated banners on the fly using standard PHP. My host doesn't support ttf so the font is pretty blah. Search over at phpClasses.org for some sample code. There's another site http://fotoflexer.com/ too that has some nifty skills.