How are the Penguin Greetings'
cards made?
 The cards included in Penguin
Greetings reflect my own personal
tastes. As a UNIX user, I dislike
cards that depend on plug-ins or
specific email clients. Most of
the photos for Penguin Greetings were
taken either at my Mother's house (she
is quite a gardener!  ) or
around the Orinda, Moraga, and
Lafayette area (part of the San
Francisco East Bay.) Many of the
pictures have been taken while cycling
in the area (see the self-portrait at
right.) Still some other photos come
from my more exotic hobbies of scuba
diving and amateur astronomy. A number
of photos in the main collection and
obviously all of the photos from the
Savoring the sights of Seattle
collection were taken during the
fall and winter of 2004-2005 while I
was working at Amazon.com. Believe it
or not, there are even two new poppy
photos in the California Poppy
Collection that were actually taken
along a railroad siding in Seattle
(hardy little flowers aren't they! )
Most of
the photos were taken with a 27 year
old 35mm SLR camera. I has the
photos digitized and put on a CD
when the film is processed to avoid the
need to scan the images by hand.
Until the fall of 2004, I used my
trusty Apple Powerbook G3 (1999 -
Lombard) as my image processing
tool. While working at
Amazon.com, I upgraded myself to a 17"
Powerbook G4 (employment has its
virtues!) Once the images come back
from developing, I archive them in
Apple's iPhoto.
To create the cards themselves, I use
the multipurpose graphic tool Canvas
from ACD Systems.
Canvas incorporates both image
processing tools like Adobe Photoshop
and vector drawing tools like Adobe
Illustrator so that a single program
can handle both chores.
The cards featuring Jesus, the
Virgin Mary, and the saints are little
bit more complicated. The holy figures
are statues that have been photographed
and then digitally inserted into a
background. When possible, I've tried
to make images that are at least
reminiscent of common portrayals of the
holy figure involved.
Penguin Greetings History
Back in December of 2002, I decided to
upgrade from my crummy command line
program for sending out web-based
Christmas cards to some sort of
web-based ecard program.
Attempting to avoid the instinct
to reinvent the wheel, I tried to find
a simple open sourced ecards program
and I settled on Les "Buddy" VanBrunt's
WebGrams
program. WebGrams is a simple,
robust, and easy to use program.
Alas, it lacked two features that
I really wanted: scheduling of ecard
sending and multipart MIME (HTML)
email. As an unemployed Perl
programmer suffering from "code monkey"
withdrawal, I decided to make a "few
changes" and before too long ended up
with a completely new program!
Penguin Greetings has continued to
grow into a very unique tool that
combines the power of Perl and CPAN to
provide a potent efficient engine with
the avantages of a scripting
environment provided by Embperl or
HTML::Mason. The latest releases of
Penguin Greetings illustrate this power
with different features implemented at
different levels. Some features are
delibrates embedded in the software
engine to spare
developers/adminstrators unnecessary
hassles. Other features like scheduling
when card categories are display during
the calendar year are implemented
deliberately at the embedded perl layer
to simply development (in this case
localization issues.)
This page was
generated from file
history.epl.html which was last
updated on:
5/9/2005
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