What is going on behind the scenes

It has been a while since I have posted here. I have been very busy, because it's hard to escape of a very difficult situation.

What I can say is that I'm looking for new models and operation styles for my project, so Picture to People could naturally get funds to stay online and evolve fast. The failed crowdfunding campaign was a horrible experience and I don't want to pass through something similar again. On the other hand, I don't want to give up a so cool project that already took me thousands and thousands of hours over the years.

In future, I intend to offer a better site along with new outstanding features, but P2P will be focused on subscribers, that is, people who support the project and help it to be healthy.

I didn't decide yet if there will be absolutely free apps and tools as the ones that Picture to People offers nowadays. To be honest, currently I have no motivation to keep free graphic design tools online, because the failed campaign was very devastating. It has shown to me how our millions of users are really selfish.

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New cool UI feature

Now Picture to People has a cool output page that is shown when you click the "Generate" button from one of our online design apps. This page is responsive, so it works well in any device and any resolution.

It offers a nice way to show the images and effects you create. It also has a handy way to download each image you have just generated.

This new feature is not compatible with the old implementation using HTTP streams, so if you have used Picture to People recently, you must clean your browser cache.

As a bonus feature, each time this page loads, it shows at bottom several suggestions of very popular online graphic apps. They are used by thousands of people daily, so you could like to try them out too.

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Counting in statistics of a massive cyber attack

Picture to People site was attacked yesterday, just like thousands of sites around the world (including many big companies sites). The host server software was deeply damaged, including the OS, so our site stopped working correctly. No harm was caused to users, except an offline P2P site.

Almost miraculously, after hours of a very hard troubleshooting, we were able to set up P2P site precariously online for a while. After that, we started working to make a real site recovery that can last days or weeks. During this time, outages can happen anytime for hours or days. Until everything is really solved, the site can apparently load, but occasionally any page can fail in any strange way.

We also need to be sure we got rid of the OS vulnerability that attackers exploited.

When P2P site gets more protected and fully functional again, we will notify on our Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Picture-to-People-105265599561619/

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After a failed crowdfunding campaign

The crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for Picture to People project ended almost two weeks ago.

I can tell this campaign was a complete fail, because it was unable to raise any relevant amount of money to keep Picture to People project online. Picture to People became too big, so it needs a big investment. If a small part of our millions of users had donated $1, the project would be safe for 2 or 3 years.

I keep facing a big list of pending problems to solve:

1. Pay for expensive servers that Picture to People demands at least for a year. If the number of users keeps increasing, we intend also to be able to make at least one server upgrade;
2. Create a pure CSS, simple, cross-browser and responsive site template suitable to Picture to People needs, with fixed and flowing parts (couldn't find one as we want);
3. Redesign and recode our interface components to be more reusable, responsive and match the new site template;
4. Completely rewrite all our Javascript pieces of code, making them more reusable, more scalable and more encapsulated;
5. Rewrite all hundreds of site pages according to the new template, new Javascripts and new interface components;
6. Fix the issue of ids collision in pages with multiple color components;
7. Create a flexible scheme for lazy media loading that is design friendly;
8. Modify content and presentation of many pages to make them faster to load.
9. Rewrite our HTTP connector (back-end) to include more features like sessions, result page generation, etc;
10. Create a more modular and extensible architecture of input and output filters to our request processing pipeline;
11. Develop an automated procedure to optimize to the extreme thousands of images used in the site;
12. Improve, extend and optimize our inter-process pipe implementation;
13. Investigate thoroughly and try to solve the problem of intermittent mysterious Apache crashes.

One thing I know for sure: I will never have again the same excitement to develop free tools for user that turned their back on me.

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Picture to People crowdfunding

Picture to People is at risk of getting permanently offline due to lack of resources. Visit our crowdfunding campaign launched on a secure and reliable platform. There you will know better the perks you can get by making a donation.

We really would like to receive donations via PayPal, but we couldn't make it work. To receive donations directly through PayPal in our country, it's needed to have a registered company or a registered non-profit organization.

We decided to run our campaign on indiegogo.com. It's the world's second biggest crowdfunding platform and it's trusted by thousands of projects and millions of donators around the globe (currently they have almost 500,000 fans on Facebook). Indiegogo site communication is protected with HTTPS (encryption) and they use an enterprise class platform to process credit card transactions.

Moreover, Indiegogo have some useful advantages:
- Indiegogo's fees are much lower than PayPal ones, so Picture to People project can get a larger part of the raised funds;
- Indiegogo makes easy contacting donators, so we can handle the problem of delivering the perks.

Please make a donation before it's too late.

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Google PageSpeed Insights can degrade image quality

I'm really very tired of being a slave of Google dictations about what is a good site and what is good content. However, there is no way to deny that most sites depend on Google search engine results to become known to computer and mobile users.

Anyway, Google gets more and more arrogant as time goes. Since some time ago, they have a tool called "PageSpeed Insights". Despite the name makes it seem like an advisory report generator, probably someday, if a site doesn't reach good results, it can be penalized in search engine. It already happened with their tool to test if a site is "mobile friendly". From advisory to slavery. They really decided to dictate what is good or bad in internet. Let the user choose is not good enough for them.

I don't like Google playing God, but the situation becomes unbearable when they make things with wrong premises or technical flaws. Their PageSpeed Insights tests any site page and can give you the "right answer", so you can get a good score. In other words, this tool lets you download the optimized resources from the tested page, so you can use them "as they should be" to deliver a fast page.

In the Picture to People case, for most JPG images, the only way to make PageSpeed Insights satisfied about the images size is using the images it "optimizes" by itself. I have made many tests and no "non-destructive" optimization was good enough to PageSpeed Insights.

PageSpeed Insights decreased the JPG quality of my images (increasing the lossy compression rate), but usually it's negligible just for regular (high entropy) photos. For my JPG images that are not regular photos, Google "dummy optimization" generated visible graphic artifacts (noise), degrading visual quality. Saving these images as PNG files is not an option, because JPG format generates much smaller files, even when using a small (non visible) quality loss as I made to publish them at the site.

Saying it another way, many Picture to People pages will just get a high score from PageSpeed Insights if I use poor quality images. It's not reasonable and Google should immediately fix this. They can optimize images as they want, but they NEVER can decrease original image quality based on general naive assumptions. It can just create a poorer and uglier web.

Below I show you three examples. First you see the original image, after the same image visually corrupted by PageSpeed Insights (click an image to see it full-size). Maybe the problem is not strong in your monitor, but it can be annoying in many ones.

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Text effect tutorials (43)

I invite you to see some more text effect tutorials I have posted at the blog about how to create text logos online. This blog presents tips and tricks to design hundreds of cool text logos.

- a cookie text effect logo online;
- a realistic icy text logo effect;
- a led lamps text effect logo.

Below you see the text logos you get by following the listed tutorials.

Picture to People offers thousands of cool logo makers. See by yourself at the online logo generators page.

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Torn paper text logo generator online

Since a small time ago, Picture to People site offers an text generator to make torn paper text effects. We already had several paper logo generators online, like for example: 3D paper text logos, burning paper text logos and folded paper text effects, and now there is even one more.

This Torn Paper Text Effect Creator costed me some very hard work, because it was difficult to implement a generic procedural way to render the torn paper borders needed to make the effect realistic. The solution I found was a kind of "stacked fractal".

There also is the option of producing text effects with transparent background. In this case, the paper effect creator returns a graphic as a semi-transparent PNG image file. See below a sample of paper text logo designed by using this new online logo generator app.

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Photo to graffiti online

If you love graffiti art, probably you will like to know that Picture to People offers a nice photo effect editor related to this subject.

By using the Photo Graffiti Effect Editor you can create graffiti paintings from regular photos. You can even produce several gradient effects that are seen in some kind of graffiti designs.

Below you can see a simple example. There are several graffiti drawing styles and other interesting configuration options. By setting them up wisely, you can transform virtually any photo into a beautiful graffiti.

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Turn photo into sketch online

After a lot of research, I could finally develop a new sketch photo effect editor. It brought to Picture to People project a completely new level of non-realistic drawing photo editor.

With this photo sketch generator, each drawing is made of thousands of even millions of individual strokes, but they are chosen and rendered in much more intelligent and coherent ways, making possible a higher preservation of original fine details.

Moreover, this photo sketch algorithm has several important freedom degrees, so its interface has a lot of useful and interesting design parameters. This can help users to get artistic styles like made by using pencil, pen and ink, watercolor, pastel, charcoal, crayon, chalk, etc.

As a bonus feature, I added options to customize background and strokes colors, what helps to increase the plethora of available design effects.

By using this photo sketch maker, it's possible to produce, in a few seconds, pencil drawings that look carefully drawn by talented artists. Below you see a drawing created with this professional Photo to Pencil Sketch Converter Online.

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