I’ve looked and looked - for a perfect regex to grab a link off a page, for out-sourcers who can do Ruby, and also for a slideshow builder… There have been some that come close, but nothing perfect for the job - nowadays, in these brave new times of embedded content, I have basically given up and resorted to Flash…

Antsoft are a Web Design Software outfit with a particular interest in this kind of thing - they do a Flash Slideshow Builder - the important point is that the output is Adobe Flash, or exe. Get a pile of pictures and display them with animation effects and bit of music and pull the visitors in… and they have a thirty day free trial of the software - which does no harm at all to try.

It is worth drifting towards this sort of solution now - we are, most of us that are going to be visting a tecchie web site,at least, on cable and broadband so the old objections are slipping away.

No, I’m not quite ready to mourn the passing of Macromedia - always a very ratio of bugs/dollars with that company’s overated products, but it does seem that flash or exe is the way to go now.