Yesterday I promoted a dynamic badge I created for America Held Hostage.  Today I’m going to explain how I went about creating this badge.

First, I designed my badge in Photoshop:

Couldn’t I have just used PHP to create this image? Well, of course I could have. But that wouldn’t be a responsible use for resources either system or development. The essentials of the badge won’t change and making it all dynamic is silly.

Now that we have the badge, we simply want to add text to it using PHP. In this case, we’re going to add a countdown till January 20, 2009.

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