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Nginx and the Image format wars.

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NGINX - Image Wars

We’ve talked about the videos, we’ve talked about the images. Now we talk about the web server, Nginx.

In this entry, we’re going to get crazy technical with how we deploy all of these new image formats that are being introduced in what feels like “The Great Video/Image War” to finally put GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs, and MP4s to bed. But instead, we’re going to talk about a section that seems skipped a lot. How do we actually implement these new formats? Because if we do a review on an image format, it’s good. Then as bloggers, it would be hypocritical to not apply these formats to our site. It however opens up questions. How do we maintain the security of our readers while at the same time giving them the very best image with the lowest bandwidth conceivable? Thankfully since we have a VPS a lot of the encoding is handled via CRON. While a lot of the deciding factors of which browser gets served and what file are all in the hands of NGINX web daemon.

Read on if you want to know more.

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Section 2: SSH and Samba on the Raspberry Pi.

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Using SAMBA and SSH on the Raspberry Pi Title.

Adding SSH and Samba onto the Raspberry Pi.

Now it’s time to add SSH and Samba. For those who do not know what that is. SSH is a secure shell system that allows us to remote into our pi from any computer capable of loading an SSH client such as PuTTY onto their system. SSH can also be used for FTP transfers as a way of uploading files such as apk’s and images to your Raspberry Pi so you can then access them via ADB to your Ouya. But instead of SSH-FTP, we’re also going to load Samba which is a windows network sharing protocol allowing us seamless transfers from our PC or MAC over wireless to our Raspberry Pi.

Now, for those who are using the Raspberry Pi as a desktop or don’t care to use it in a headless manner like we do having it hooked up in our living room to the Ouya. You can probably skip this tutorial altogether! However, for those who are using it as a headless unit then read on as we provide all of the instructions down below.

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WebP image format wars.

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WebP Title

WebP from Google will deliver faster internet to you. But at what cost?

WebP is something I found out by total accident when asking the simple question of:

Why does Google Chrome not support animated .PNG files?

– S

It turns out Google instead of including the format into the library on their browser decided instead to exclude it. Although you can simply download an animated PNG plugin for Chrome here. That’s not the point. The point is it should be natively supported which it is not. If Google finally did support animated PNG files then Google now supports APNG which now we can put an axe into animated .GIF files. A Format which is still in use since the late 1980’s! Animated GIF files are now old enough to run for president of the United States! However, Google’s attitude was as follows:

Why spend any more time on other formats like PNG and JPG when WebP will be cooler!

Note: This issue with Google Chrome as of 7/25/2017 has now been resolved but the entry still stand for archival reasons.

Read on if you want to see more.

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