PopCard Greetings 2.3

PopCard Greetings 2.3 (PopCard for short) is a free script which you can use to add Pixaria style electronic postcards to your site or as an Apple iCards replacement on your own website. PopCard was originally based on iCards which was a feature of Apple's iTools service which later became .Mac and is now called Mobile Me.

PopCard is (as far as I know) unique in that the card is sent to the recipient as a JPEG image rather than the user having to come to the site to pick it up which makes it a bit more personal than your average ecard.

Installation

If you haven't already, you will need to download the script (700k) to your computer and unpack the archive.

The script hasn't been updated since 2006 but it should still work fine on most servers. The original documentation has unfortunately gone to the great database in the sky but installing PopCard is fairly simple:

1. Upload all the files to your server.
2. Set permissions of '777' on the directories /resources/smarty/templates_c/ and /resources/smarty/caches/
3. Use your web browser to navigate to popcard.php

Cards from remote files

PopCard has the ability to generate cards from remote files by including them over HTTP. To do this, all you need to do is pass the full URL (including the 'http://' protocol part) to the script in this fashion.

http://www.mysite.com/popcard.php?pu=http://www.othersite.com/jpegimage.jpg

This technique makes it easy for you to integrate PopCard with any image library or website you like. Just remember that it's not cool to steal images from other sites and yes, linking to them like this is stealing..!

Notes about customisation

If you want to modify the look and feel of the templates in resources/templates/ you will need to delete the cached templates in resources/smarty/templates_c/ each time you make a modification. I plan to remove the integration with Smarty from a future release of PopCard and replace it with my own template engine which will remove this requirement.

Security Warning

PopCard hasn't been updated since 2005 and hasn't been reviewed for security issues since then. If you decide to use PopCard on your site, you do so entirely at your own risk so if you're at all worried about the implications of installing it, I suggest you don't until I release a new version.