Source.

A long time back blogspot removed the feature that enabled publishing to an external domain. Using a little perl-fu, I created a simple markup-to-html processor and went independent. Well, that code was shoestringy and so it's finally time to EOL it.

I decided to have fun with the new gallery (multiple image thumbnail) design. Then it quickly became unfun. I ended up with a couple hundred lines of agony, owing primarily to the combination of trying to introduce suboptimality and randomness into a knapsack problem (images/cells) and secondarily to the way that rowspan and colspan work. But I think every permutation of it works.

Another improvement is that gallery and full size images are now scaled a priori, rather than using html/css scaling. In-browser scaling is a little nicer on my storage quota, but slower to load.

The old method of cropping thumbnails was a fixed value, somewhere around the first third of the image. Sort of a middle-of-the-road approach. Now that I'm doing some automated image processing, I applied a pretty basic heuristic to try to find better croppings. Simply put, I scan some lines left-to-right and top-to-bottom and score the possible croppings by their contrast value over several pixels. The contrast means there will be something interesting in that area of the image, the pixel window hopefully means the algorithm will select something close to the focal plane.

I've retrofitted 2014, 2013 has some shenanigans that has to be accounted for separately. Once that's been taken care of I can re-process all the way back to 2010.07.

The one feature that was lost with the blogspot move was tags. Specifically, clicking 'kafka' and seeing a concatenated list of posts about the grey dog. I would like to bring these back, but it's a bit more work. Plus there is potential cleverness like displaying only titles or relevant portions of a post.

At present, the tags will autopopulate a search (also I added search at the bottom). I elected to use duckduckgo for reasons of internet hippiedom, of course search takes you to their domain. Either because my two hits per day (thanks Mom!) site doesn't get indexed much or because ddg is still a shitty search engine, the results aren't great (yet).

And maybe a slideshow view that presents just images.


The 2014 fantasy season came to an end. The championship game in Password is Taco was a bit of a disappointment, I needed a makeable 40 from Peyton and AJ but the way the game played out hope died quickly. Medieval Gridiron was mired by Loangate and Votegate, but at least I won out in the consolation ladder.


A little while ago a bought an hdmi media capture card for a pc that didn't have sufficient pci-x slots. Now that I have a decent media setup in the study, I installed the card in my main desktop. I think I might have some fun with it.

Related - internal

Related - external