3d Newspaper (test) - milestone 1

One of the interacive elements that I plan on including in the "bridge"(working title) mini-world that I'm working on is a faded newspaper with articles from one year ago today.
I could do that by just creating a single texture, but I want it to be more dynamic than that. So instead, I'm working towards scraping news and building the texture on the fly.
The basic approach is as follows:
  1. CURL a search request to a news site (currently, latimes.com)
  2. parse the markup of the page using PHP's XML functions
  3. generate a newspaper texture using the parsed info using the GD library
  4. render the image onto a 3d model in an x3d scene
The creation of the newspaper image is rudimentary at present, but I'll be improving it to include full stories (currently just one-line summaries) and images, as well as creating a better base texture to make the result look properly faded/weathered. It also seems that I'll have to modify the search process to get results from a full year ago (currently grabbing results from yesterday).

Click here to see what the generated texture looks like.

If you have a x3d plugin installed, you can also go here to see it in action for yourself.