2023-12-19 20:02:15 -05:00
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@extends('layouts.master')
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@section('page-title', 'Support and The History of the Art Generator')
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@section('meta_description', 'Learn the history of the No Agenda Art Generator and how to support the generator.')
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@section('page-top')
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<section class="inner-page-banner bg-2 bg-image">
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<div class="container">
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<div class="inner text-center">
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<h1 class="title">Support & History</h1>
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<nav class="mt-4">
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<ol class="breadcrumb justify-content-center">
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<li class="breadcrumb-item"><a href="/">Home</a></li>
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<li class="breadcrumb-item active">Explore</li>
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</ol>
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</nav>
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</div>
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</div>
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</section>
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@endsection
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@section('page-content')
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<section class="pt-120 pb-90 blog-details-wrapper">
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<div class="container">
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<div class="row">
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<div class="col-xl-8 mb-6">
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<div class="blog-content">
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<h2 class="mb-2">History of the No Agenda Art Generator</h2>
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<ul class="meta">
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<li>19 Dec 2024</li>
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<li>Development</li>
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<li class="date"><i class="ri-time-line"></i>{{ Carbon\Carbon::create(2023, 12, 19, 22, 1, 9)->diffForHumans() }}</li>
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</ul>
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<p>In June of 2010, there was no formal process to submit artwork to
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the No Agenda Podcast for use as album artwork for each episode. At the same time,
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I was in the process of learning the then "new to me" Drupal 6 Content Management
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System. I realized that I could kill two birds with one stone by improving the process
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of uploading artwork, add some community and competition to the process and learn more
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about Drupal module development by building a simple tool that would allow anyone to
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submit artwork live as we trolled-along in the IRC "trollroom" as the show was recorded
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by our venerable hosts, Adam and John C.</p>
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<p>The first variation of the Art Generator was built over the course of a weekend, and
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as part of that development, I did my best to re-create the work of Sir Randy Asher and Sir Paul T.
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who had, up until that point, submitted the bulk of the user submitted artwork in the archive.
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</p>
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<p>For the next almost four years and roughly 4,500 art submissions, the generator continued
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in it's first interation with an abandonded upgrade to Drupal 7 somewhere in the duration as the Drupal
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community was more focused on writing "codes-of-conduct" than writing actual code.</p>
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<p>Around that time, many in the PHP community and myself
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became aware of an upcoming framework that seemed to offer a ton of promise - Laravel, and I chose to
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use the generator to become familiar with that new framework. In October 2014, the Art Generator was
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re-written from the ground up using the Laravel 4 platform which greatly simplified the maintenance and
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customization of the platform.
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</p>
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<p>In 2022, I started to run into minor issues due to the age of the codebase, support for older versions
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of the database and PHP were becoming deprecated, and tackling them would require a basic rewrite of
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the entire platform (seriously, the upgrade path from Laravel 4 to 5 suggests re-writing the application.)
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Laravel had matured, and became the most popular PHP framework on the Internet, upgrades between versions
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had become relatively painless and took a few minutes to a few hours. However, I procrastinated doing the re-write
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as I was already spending my days writing Laravel code and I put a lot of focus learning other technologies
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that would make the upgrade worthwhile.
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</p>
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<p>I began the re-write for the current interation of the Art Generator, in early 2023, working on small pieces
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on weekends as free-time allowed, the core functionality of the system is now powered by Laravel 10 and I used
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much of the development time to learn some of the new third-party add-ons that would improve developer's experience
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moving forward such as Laravel Live-Wire, Docker, Docker Compose, Traefik, Caddy and other technology. Development
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in earnest began in early summer of 2023 - a new design was developed using a new logo graciously provided by
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<a href="/artist/nykko-syme">Nykko Syme</a> and addressing some community requests for both dark and light mode support,
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easier to access download links for the artwork, and a much more streamlined codebase allowing for future development
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with less pain points. A bonus is the ability for me to run the entire stack in Docker making migrating to other hosting
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and development environments smoother.
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</p>
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<p>Toward the end of September, the host that had powered the Art Generator since 2010 emailed its customers and
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notified us they would be shutting down without warning. I took the time to migrate the database away from that host,
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and moved as much of the site off of them as possible while working as quickly as possible to finish the upgrade. Communicating
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with them, I was told to expect to continue to have hosting until my paid-in-advance hosting ran out, which would have
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been through May of 2024 - but on the morning of November 30, 2023, they disappeared without a trace, stopped answering
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the phone, and emails bounced. This lit a fire under my rear to complete the newest build as I was very close to complete.
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</p>
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<p>
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The latest version of the generator launched on Sunday, December 17<sup>th</sup>, 2024 to a rocky launch with "good-enough"
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functionality, it took a few days to stabilize the cacheing and hardware, but you are now viewing the "new hotness" or whatever
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the kids these days call it, powered by Laravel 10 in a docker powered container that can be migrated in minutes to other locations.
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It facilitates point-in-time backups, and as you will see below, makes it fairly simple for anyone to grab and entire archive of the
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artwork submitted to the site in an sane, organized manner. Here's some of the new features that really made the upgrade worth it:
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</p>
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<ul>
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<li>All artwork is optimized, sized, and scaled to the absolute smallest filesize while having the resolutions required by Apple (3,000px x 3,000px) and by the sane people in the world (512px x 512px) with none of the extraneous temporary files and unnecessary thumbnails of the old system.</li>
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<li>The artwork is organized by year, month, and date, with the artist's name and artwork title in the filename so offline use is easier.</li>
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<li>Even with the larger resolutions available for download, the size of the artwork archive was cut nearly in half from 30Gb+ to approx 15Gb.</li>
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<li>Artists get a lot more credit on the new version, it's easier to find their additional work, and get high quality downloads of that work.</li>
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<li>While not yet implemented in the production site, the new version was built from the ground up with support for more than one podcast. In the coming weeks, I hope to expand and turn that feature on for additional podcasts in the No Agenda Community.</li>
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</ul>
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<p>Want to download your own copy of the archive? Know wget and/or curl? There are lists in the sidebar you can download that are updated each time a piece
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of artwork is approved. I plan to make this easier for non-dudes/dudettes named Ben soon. In the meantime, enjoy your stay, note the v4v section, and be
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decent to one another.
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</p>
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<p class="text-right">--<br>"Sir" Paul Couture<br>Keeper of the Artwork</p>
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</div>
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</div>
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<div class="col-xl-4 mb-6">
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<aside class="sidebar">
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<div class="single-widget recent-post mt-0">
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<h3 class="title">Support | Value4Value</h3>
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<div class="inner">
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<ul>
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<li><a class="d-block" href="http://dvorak.org/NA">Support the Show</a><span class="cate small">First and Foremost, support our boys.</span></li>
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<li><a class="d-block" href="https://paypal.me/caincouture">PayPal Me</a><span class="cate small">@CainCouture and buy me a coffee - or twelve.</span></li>
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2024-05-26 07:48:58 -04:00
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<li><a class="d-block" href="https://venmo.com/ucturtle">Venmo</a><span class="cate small">@ucturtle if you prefer.</span></li>
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2023-12-19 20:02:15 -05:00
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<li><a class="d-block" href="https://getalby.com/p/pcouture">V4V: ⚡pcouture@getalby.com</a><span class="cate small">Use the lightning network.</span></li>
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<li><a class="d-block" href="https://static.noagendaartgenerator.com/assets/img/btc-naart-qr.png">Crypto: <i class="ri-btc-line"></i> Old School BTC</a><span class="cate small">bc1qvkm9fpycc8q99kudqwukd8cf8xgxdrhp6a5zl8</span></li>
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</ul>
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</div>
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</div>
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<div class="single-widget recent-post mt-8">
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<h3 class="title">Download The Archive</h3>
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<div class="inner">
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<p>Choose one or both of the text lists below for a wget or curl formatted text list to download your own personal copy of the archive.</p>
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<ul>
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<li><a class="d-block" href="/download-archive/hd">High-Resolution Archive List</a></li>
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<li><a class="d-block" href="/download-archive/sd">Standard Resolution Archive List</a></li>
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</ul>
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<p class="mb-0 mt-4">I recommend the following:<br>
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<span class="cate small">Replace "{filename-of-list.txt}" with the filename you downloaded.</span></p>
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<hr>
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<pre><code> wget \
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--content-disposition \
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--trust-server-names \
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-i {filename-of-list.txt}</code></pre>
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<hr>
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</div>
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</div>
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</aside>
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</div>
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</div>
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</div>
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</section>
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@endsection
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