A friend of mine wanted to start his own blog, and as a major astronomy buff, he picked out the Red Planet theme. I thought a nice touch would be to add the Astronomy Picture of the Day widget to his sidebar.  However, nothing is ever as easy as it seems. The plugin failed, because url file access was disabled in the php.ini configuration on the webhost. I attempted to change this using the ini_set() function, but was unsuccessful. Not willing to give up, I rewrote a large portion of the widget that retrieves the APOD content to use cURL instead. In a nutshell, the widget uses cURL to read the APOD page for the current day. There are two images in the page - a small version and a large version. The source of both images is parsed from the captured html, and cURL is used again to fetch the image data for the small image. Because of the security settings, I couldn't do a getimagesize() call against the image URL directly, so I had to write the image data to a temp file first, and then I was able to get the dimensions of the image to resize it to fit within the sidebar.