this is a simple implementation of a 'tagboard' or 'shoutboard' that one sees in the wild on various web sites.
what makes this interesting is that it renders the text as an image. this means that it can be included in a LJ entry (other tagboards use javascript and/or inline frames to show the text, neither of which is allowed in a LJ entry).
(why you'd even want a tagboard in an LJ entry is another question entirely :P)
also... most other shoutboards/tagboards i've seen update the message display without leaving the page (via javascript). again, since i can't use javascript in an LJ entry, all i can do is go to a page which *does* use javascript to go back to the page you started on. unfortunately, if i do that right away, the image does not reload. instead i load the new image on the new page, and when it's done reloading, the javascript kicks in and takes you back to the tagboard (using history.go(-1)). of course it only works if javascript is enabled, and the image reloading behaviour may be browser-sensitive. YMMV.
CAVEAT: i just whipped this up pretty quickly, so it likely has all kinds of wonky bugs. plus it's not very resource-efficient: it rerenders the text whenever the image is requested, which is silly: what i ought to do is cache the image and render it only when someone submits a new comment.
