Introducing Presidential Vimagi, Where Anyone Can Paint Political Cartoons for US Presidents

With elections around the corner and politics everywhere these days, I couldn't resist throwing some Erlang into the mix. Don't worry, I'm not about to start discussing my political opinions on this blog. You can find plenty of political commentary on other sites. Instead, I decided to create a sub-Vimagi for political cartoons: Presidential Vimagi.

On Presidential Vimagi, you don't write or talk about your political views. You paint them. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a painting is worth, well, you do the math.

To give you inspiration, I assembled an all star cast of American presidents, vice presidents and presidential candidates: George Bush, Dick Cheney, Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Ron Paul, Bill Clinton and Al Gore. They each have a profile and you can paint on their profile's v.boards. You can also become friends with them if you want to show your support.

Presidential Vimagi is still a bit rough around the edges, so please let me know if you find any bugs or issues. Feature suggestions are also welcome, of course.

Update: I decided to take the site down for now. It's too prone to vandalism and I don't have the time to constantly monitor it to remove the offensive stuff. It was a fun experiment while it lasted. Oh well :)

Vimagi: The Facebook App

I finally finished the Vimagi Facebook app! Check out the screen shots:





The app works similar to the vimagi.com website: you can create paintings with titles, tags, and descriptions and share them with anyone. Other Facebook users can comment on the paintings and rate them. Paintings created in Facebook are automatically posted to vimagi.com, where vimagi.com users can also add comments and ratings. All paintings have embed codes you can use to embed them on any site (with playback). In Facebook, you can create paintings for your Facebook friends and those paintings will appear on their (and your) profile. Similar to vimagi.com, the Facebook app has a gallery and a tags page, which contains content from both vimagi.com and the Facebook app.

I created the Facebook app mostly as a learning exercise, but I also believe that the Vimagi features would appeal to more people by being embedded into people's their existing social network rather than in a standalone site.

Unfortunately, I underestimated how tricky it would be to port the vimagi.com features and code into Facebook without breaking the site and while seamlessly blending the paintings and data created on Facebook and on vimagi.com. (One of the pesky issues I encountered is that Facebook applications have root URLs of the form http://apps.facebook.com/[app name], which was incompatible with the vimagi.com relative URLs. The existing URLs all start with a forward slash, assuming they follow immediately after the domain name. My life would have been much better if Facebook used the url scheme "http://[app name].apps.facebook.com/" for Facebook apps as it would have allowed existing URLs to remain unmodified.)

If you like to paint, I hope you enjoy the applications, and if you have friends who like to paint, please send them an invitation. Facebook needs some more Erlang-generated pageviews :)

If you like Vimagi and you're on Facebook, please join the Vimagi fan club. Also, I'll appreciate it if you let me know of any feedback or suggestions you may have.

P.S. Thanks I to Bryan Fink for the excellent erlang2facebook library.

Vimagi Speedups

Vimagi was much slower than it should have been.

I had foolishly compiled Vimagi in production with {auto_compile, true}. This option tells ErlyWeb to scan the app's source files and recompile all the ones that have changed since the last request. This feature greatly speeds up development because you can edit your file, reload the page, and immediately see the effects of your changes. It was also convenient for me in production because after checking in some changes from my dev box I would just 'svn up' on the production server and the changes will be deployed automatically. Unfortunately, I didn't realize what a negative impact it has on performance. Thankfully, David King brought this to my attention on the ErlyWeb mailing list and I've since disabled auto_compile on the production server.

Vimagi performs much better now. Clicking around the site, most pages now load in 0.3 - 0.5 secs according to YSlow. It feels much faster. In fact, Vimagi's performance is now similar to BeerRiot's, which is no small feat.

By the way, I'm not sure about BeerRiot, but Vimagi's pages are all dynamically generated -- I haven't implemented any caching (my VPS can easily handle the current traffic levels, so implmeneting caching right now would be a premature optimization). For an entirely dynamic site, I think this is very good performance.