About LifeinBklyn

I made a site update that will hopefully fix the pseudo-random image rotation issues, with the trade off of limiting the size of images that are stored.

Previously, images were stored on the site at their native size, although displayed at a reduced size when viewing. That was fine 15 years ago, but now even cheap phones take huge pictures. This caused issues when rotating large images, since image rotation is memory intensive and in some cases the rotation process would use up all available server memory and crash. Storing files at native size also has the issue of taking up more storage, although image storage is cheap.

Now, if either width or height is over 1920 pixels, the image will be resized during the upload process. In most cases, that means a new maximum image size of 1920 x 1445. Note that this does not change how images are viewed in posts/comments, only the maximum resolution when you click on a picture.

I also increased the maximum images that can be uploaded at once to 30 images totaling 100MB.
There were also teaks made to memory allocation of various site components that will hopefully help stability.

As always, let me know if you see anything strange.

Overnight Eastern Time, when all good Americans should be sleeping, I'll be making a site update that will require a some down time.
There should be no changes to the functionality of the site, but I am updating pretty much all of the back end components that are now over 4 years old.

So, it's been over 3 years since I looked at the site finances.
The good news is that everything is pretty much on autopilot, and we've gotten a handful of very generous donations that have offset almost all the cost of running the site.

In the last 3 years, monthly expenses have gone up around $5 a month, largely because Amazon AWS (our hosting provider) added new $3.60-$3.72 monthly charge for public IP address, as well as Domain Name Registration increasing $6 a year for our two domains, and increased storage costs due to additional storage for images.
The average monthly cost for running the site (hosting + domain Name registration) is around $18 per month.

Details in the comments.

As always, donations are appreciated but not required.

I'll be making a site update this evening.

It will fix the show/hide images bug

The bigger thing is that I re-wrote the site configuration file in preparation of future updates, so be on the lookout for strange bugs after I make the update.