This is not terribly difficult to accomplish. I acctually wrote my own signature generator from scratch and added some other features.
Namely I was tired of having to parse data from the eq2players website all the time, so I had it update an entry in a database instead, with a timestamp. If the data in the db is more than 4 hours old, it grabs the data from eq2players again, and updates the database.
The image I generate is then always pulled from my database. This reduces how many reads and parses have to be done from eq2players, as well as adds fault tolerance (in the event eq2player is down, my script will just use the database data without updating) I then added a feature that allows it to dynamically use a different background image based on what the user wants (passing a variable) and if the one they choose doesn't exist it will automatically use a default background image...
Another idea that I may add to my next version is the ability to instead put your personal stats (health, defense, etc...) in a tooltip for the image (alt attribute) instead of in the image itself.
Of course this would all be super easy if they just went ahead and added xml data to eq2players so we can get the data pure without having to parse it from an html page...
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