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.