A lot of people like to talk about freedom. They like to hold it forth as an ideal, particularly in regards to topics like speech, association, religion, sexual preference, and so forth. Some even go so far as to criticize others for infringing upon their freedom of speech when they themselves are criticized. Recently, a spat between the likes of 7chan, Hal Turner, and some dude have brought the importance of the concept of liberty to the forefront of my thoughts.

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There’s a song on Sesame Street, which I watch several times a week with my son, that goes something like this:

One of these things is not like the others
One of these things just doesn’t belong
Can you tell with thing is not like the others
By the time I finish this song?

I was reminded of this when I realized that an administrative function I added to Shimmie wasn’t working properly in Opera or Internet Explorer. I still use Firefox as my primary browser both at work and at home, so while this administrative widget was under development I used Firefox for testing and debugging purposes. The HTML involved was simple, with no CSS vagaries or complicated manipulations of the box model, so it shouldn’t have been necessary to rigorously pore through the myriad browser options.

How naive of me.
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As much fun as it can be to sift through sites like 4chan or Wakachan for amusing pictures, image boards of this nature tend to have storage issues. To address this, they don’t keep content available for very long. This is where sites like Danbooru come into play. Alas, sending a friend or coworker to any of these sites is likely to result in the viewing of some “not safe for work” content, and lead to embarrassment for everybody involved.

I noticed that the Danbooru back-end is publicly available, and figured I’d give it a whirl. Alas, it requires PostgreSQL. Apparently, installing PostgreSQL successfully requires a great deal of skill, the blood of an unspotted lamb, and the patience of Job. Having none of the above, I looked around to see if somebody had modified or extended Danbooru to use MySQL instead. No luck there, but I did find Shimmie, which was written by somebody also suffering PostgreSQL-traumatic stress disorder.

Shimmie doesn’t have all the features of Danbooru (like a built-in wiki, comment board, and so forth), but those weren’t germane to the core purpose of an image gallery. I installed it, uploaded a few files, and started wrenching on the code a bit. The resulting code isn’t terribly pretty (as I’m not a programmer by trade nor hobby), but the site itself has a semblance of functionality. You can find it at burrowowl.net/shimmie/ for now.

Thanks to Shish for doing 99.42% of the ground work on this.