Let's get gamercards back.. Shall we?

One of the first things that cross your mind when dealing with the Xbox Community Developer Program is to design, create and provide custom gamercards. So we're not talking about anything new here: me and Squidpunch used to do them on the old 360FriendSpot too, but that's how I spent my coding time during this last weekend so let me spend a few words on them.

First things first.. "Custom gamercards" means that you can easily get a Xbox.com-like gamercard with up-to-date Live info, games played and all that, but you also get the possibility to choose between different themes and/or designs. And the best part is that they are IMAGES (jpeg in my case), unlike the one you get on Xbox.com, which are webpages that you can't use in most sites and forums.

I decided to create them from scratch and not re-use the old 3FS code for a number of reasons and mostly because:

1. since I have used php a lot in the last months at work, I feel much more confortable with it than with asp.net - which is how 3FS cards were done
2. like I said, me and Dave developed them together for 3FS, and I thought that it wouldn't be that fair to keep them for my own
3. I had quite a lot of fun making them ;)

That said, I have them almost ready now. Actually I just need a small change on my hosting provider's part which will hopefully come tomorrow. Meanwhile, I'm cleaning up my code a bit and trying to make it nice and fast enough for the cards to be nicely usable. And finally, here's a little preview of what's to come UPDATE: cards are now online, you can get yours here!