Developer Update: Popular Virtual Youtubers, Compression Updates

Hello everyone!

Server side image compression is gross

Despite my best effort, I could not get results that would satisfy our google overlords so I ended up purchasing a bulk image optimization plan from ShortPixel as it was the most inexpensive solution. Regular gallery images will be done on rack, but the main images will be pipelined through the backend to receive optimization via Short Pixel because, frankly, they compress way better because that is the entire business model they have going on. Likewise, I did not enjoy spending a whole day messing with pngquant, optipng, jpegoptim, etc just for google to tell me I can save another 40kb.

I don't know how hard it is for them to provide a service to optimize the image themselves. If they know that they can save another 40kb, then surely they calculated that by compressing it on their own end. In which case: let me download the version you made? So strange.

Secondly, the pipeline is a little weird right now because of how it was set up. I need to basically redo it and serve up the non-optimized or "pending processing" images in order to get it to fully work. This is because cloudflare sits in front of the CDN, so cloudflare will read a cache hit and take the new origin cache lifetime (1 year) and simple serve up the thicc version basically forever.

So, when I get to it, images will be temporarily uploaded to a processing directory that is dumped every 24 hours via a lifecycle rule on AWS and a queued job on the main server will pass it to shortpixel, compress it, then move it where it is intended to be. This should keep google happy, mobile happy, etc.

Alternatively, a sugar daddy\sugar mommy\company comes in to fund us and we can leverage Cloudflare's business package which does image optimization on their end node for $200/month, dump the entire on rack solution, and move on with life.

Other Notable Updates:

• frontend menu scripts now load early to help improve front-end responsiveness (slamming the menu down button on mobile should be faster to respond before page is finished) 
• Added new "Most Popular Virtual Youtubers" area to Waifu Wars dropdown 
• changed how the trending data is collected to help prevent against abuse
• uploaded images now have a cache-control header for 1 year
• adding more lazy loading image flags
• Optimization queue for various entity images
  

Thank you for your continued support