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Tarzan 1.0 Is Now Available!

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Tarzan 1.0 is now available! There were only a couple of minor bug fixes since RC2, so existing installations shouldn’t be affected at all.

I’ve also written a custom extension for displaying my own wishlist. If you’re interested in checking it out to build off of for your own wishlists (or whatever else it might be useful for), you can get ryan_wishlist.tzx here.

And although I had wanted to add search capabilities to Tarzan by 1.0, I’ve decided to build an extension for that. I’m planning to have this extension ready by next week sometime.

Tips and Tricks

There are a couple of tips and tricks that can be used with Tarzan. I’ll post them over to the Tarzan Support Forum later on today.

Resizing images based on the size of a single side

For my wishlist, I’m more concerned about items being the same height, rather than the same width. How do I manage that? Setting either the width or height value to zero will allow image resizing of one sider to rely solely on the other. For example, if I wanted to set an item to a height of 90 pixels without caring how wide the image is, you could use this:

<?php
echo get_image($asin, 0, 0, 90);

The first is the ASIN/ISBN number of the item. The second parameter (set to zero) tells Tarzan that you want to resize the image. The third parameter (also set to zero) is the width. Since the width is set to zero, then resizing will depend entirely on the fourth parameter, height, which is set to 90 pixels.

PHP running out of memory?

Some webhosts have limits on how much memory a process can use (like the webhost for Skyzyx.com, iPowerWeb). In this case, the new clear_memory() function is helpful. This allows you to unset() the value of an array node, particularly the product that you just finished processing. You can read more about this function in the Tarzan Documentation.

Ryan Parman

is an engineering manager with over 20 years of experience across software development, site reliability engineering, and security. He is the creator of SimplePie and AWS SDK for PHP, patented multifactor-authentication-as-a-service at WePay, defined much of the CI/CD and SRE disciplines at McGraw-Hill Education, and came up with the idea of “serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud” while at Amazon Web Services in 2010. Ryan's aptly-named blog, , is where he writes about ideas longer than . Ambivert. Curious. Not a coffee drinker.