YGingras^.net

My post on building a better soda can stove was a test run for my new blog engine. For some reason, it got a lot more attention than I was hoping for. In turn, it rose to the front page on Reddit, Del.icio.us, Digg, and Makezine. Oh my...

What happened exactly? I'm not sure but I will tell my side of the story. I run this website on my home DSL. I have an upload cap of 80 kb/s. This is not great but until now it was plenty enough. Once my new blogging engine was running, I did a few test with Apache bench to see how responsive it was. Everything was fine and it didn't require much CPU load to saturate my uplink. But it didn't feel right, this test was way too artificial. At 7h16, I submitted my howto to Reddit, just to see a real world traffic spike. I didn't expect much, maybe a few hundred hits before I was down voted into oblivion. Exactly seven seconds after hitting submit, I had my first visitor. Not bad, I thought. Then an other one, and an other one, and it kept pouring like that for 36 hours. As I write this, I have brief periods of sub-saturation for the first time.

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It should be obvious at first sight; I deployed a new blog engine. I tried to minimize the number of broken links but some rearrangement was called for. There are still a few rough edges and I'm working on it. I will post a technological summary once everything is working. In the mean time, please let met know of any glitch you notice. I added convenient comment form just for that. How do you like it so far?

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Finally, I retouched the layout. After so much time with the minimal style, I felt for a graphical intensive display once again. The blue color map was just too relaxing, I spent the night zooming in and I ended up with a few nice spots. The effect is known as "pure CSS compositing", you can learn more about it on CSS/edge. Basically you need two images, a vivid one for the body background and a washed out one for the text background. You need huge images but the washed out one will compress nicely. Tip: for the Mandelbrot Set we typically have one color per iteration. The point get it's color from the number of iterations it takes for it to escape. For 255 or less iterations, you can use color index images without any loss of quality.

Making the washed out image out of the vivid one is pretty straight forward, you just paste a white layer and set opacity to ~80%. A script to update the background would be a few lines, provided that you have enough nice spots and bandwidth. At the moment the zooming is a bit broken in Frat, I can't just pick the URL from good spots and make bigger renders, I need to play with the zoom. Once this is fixed, we'll see how far I'm willing to take it.

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