Adding Detailed Zoom Images

Remember the time I added Medium Zoom? Well as it turns out, as I was reading through Zoom’s documentation, that you can specify a separate URL to load when the image zooms in. I like this, because I crop all my images to be (for landscape oriented) 1000 pixels wide, just slightly over the size of the content area that they go into. This is a serious reduction in size from the resolution they’re taken at. I do this just to improve load times, even with WebP and compression, extra pixels (that get resized to nothingness) are extra data that needs to be sent. And since it’s literally too big to be shown like that, I crop them so that pages load nearly instantly. The problem is that when you click on an image to see it, you get… basically nothing. I (because reasons) don’t have any old images so they’ll stay the same. But from now on, any images that are added in will have a detailed version that loads when you click to zoom.

You Don't Need a VPN

Really, you don’t. Actually, the entire concept of a “VPN” that most people know of isn’t even close to the actual definition. I refuse to call this one a rant, but know that this is me adding some facts.

Switching From Disqus to Commento(?)

So have you noticed that I’m now using Commento instead of Disqus for providiong comments under all my posts? No I’m serious, go take a look and then come back.

Oh, is.. is something wrong? It’s still Disqus, you say? Indeed it is, for pretty much, two reasons.

Regaining Hugo Image Processing

So as of now, there’s about half as many LFS objects in this blog’s repository, the page size has fallen by, well, not exactly a rock, but by a noticeable amount, and as of now, all my images are around the same size again. So what gives?

Well like the trend is on this site, I offloaded some responsibility to something else. And by something, I once again mean Cloudflare. This time, not workers, but a feature standard with the Pro plan that I switched to a bit ago.

Megapixels Aren't Everything

• Phone camera resolution: 64 megapixels, 2020
• Current camera (Nikon D80 DSLR) resolution: 10.2 megapixels, 2006
• Next camera (Nikon D7000 DSLR) resolution: 16.2 megapixels, 2010
• Highest-res Nikon camera I’ve found (Z7, mirrorless): 45.7 Megapixels, 2018 (ish?)

That’s a hmmm from me. But don’t get me wrong, just because the resolution is higher, does not mean that it’s a better camera. There’s so much that actually goes into a camera that just a single number isn’t telling you. Guess that means that today, we’re taking a deep-dive into camera construction, aren’t we?

Going Over My Second Amazon Bill

This is the last time I’m doing this, I swear. The difference this time is that I haven’t collaborated with someone else to generate a traffic spike. Knowing that, here’s the real cost per month of me doing this.

Upgrading to a Cloudflare Pro Plan

So as of yesterday, the Cloudflare plan on this site has changed from free to pro, the second of four, and the cheapest paid plain that they have. Really, there’s not that much that you will see, but there’s plenty of backend changes that I’m going to be using with this. And I’m going to break down what the actual changes are.

Going Over My First Amazon Bill

So I just (at the time of writing this on the 5th) got my Amazon AWS bill for the month of March, a whopping 31¢.

Let’s take a look at the real cost of what I’m using AWS for.

I'm Ashamed, Disqus

So if you’ve ever tried to leave a comment, on here or any other site that uses Disqus (“Discuss”) for commenting, you’ll notice that it has a little array of formatting buttons below the comment box that allow you to.. format your comment. Make things bold, underlined, or insert links. Cool, right? Yes, but if you look closely, you’ll notice that they’re inserting the appropriate HTML tag for whatever you just clicked. Which makes me wonder… how does Disqus deal with other HTML tags?

Configuring Cloudflare's Cache, and Cache-Control Headers

I’ve talked enough about Cloudflare caching that I’m not going to do introduce it again. This time though, we’re going in depth just a bit more, going over what’s cached, default cache times, and… more headers.