Obsolescence
===========

I'm fairly sure that deviantGALLERY will no longer work, as the new default deviantART gallery has changed somewhat, and it also now provides all the features that dG did, without the hassle of installing Greasemonkey etc.

I say "fairly sure" because I don't actually have Greasemonkey installed at the moment - I got a laptop a while ago and I've been trying (and failing) to have somethign resembling a "lean, mean, browsing machine." So why I'm using firefox at all is a very good question. And I haven't got my javascript-child installed either. you might call me a blood-traitor. Or you might not, because I'd probably get upset.


Shadows
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I've always been somewhat in awe of the deviantART shadow generator, sh.deviantart.com. It doesn't get much limelight, but it's a pretty cool tool. If you've never played with it, you ought to have done.

Now. I was going to write a brief synopsis with illustrated examples, but it seems that one is no longer allowed to play with the URL's to generate your own shadows. Which is rather a shame, IMHO. Whether this is just a momentary glitch, or a permanent change, only time will tell. (It may of course be a result of me playing with it the last week!)

In its heyday, you could make multi-coloured shadows. Which was always a source of amusement. By manupulating the parameters, you could get big shadows, flat shadows and everything in between. It's a real shame that this resource may be lost to us entirely.

After my little synopsis, I was going to give a history of my attempts to replicate this cool little program, including such excitement as "libpng" and "Segmentation Fault. Core Dumped." however I've sort of run out of steam now so I'll skip to the ending where I saw the light and managed to implement it last week using PHP (in a way that doesn't require humongous arrays, so it doesn't take minutes to run) rather than stumbling about with C.

I've put up a demo, the same examples should work. The URL syntax is almost the same, thought th efirst numerical parameter is 3 x the dA equivalent, as I couldn't see the reason for using floating points in the URL for that parameter, and you put "sh.png" on the end instead of "null.png" or "logo.png" as I didn't implement the logo feature.

If anyone is quite as excited by this as I am, I'll post the PHP source, and some JavaScript that will let you use it.

Otherwise, Happy Holidays to anyone and everyone - here's a festive shadow to get you in the mood!

Update: The coloured [link] shadows are working again now (yay!)