Instagram

Instagram Importer works again!

After some digging around and troubleshooting, I managed to fix the DsgnWrks Instagram Importer WordPress plugin on my site. It turns out quite a few people had an issue with it, which started back in September/October of last year (2017). The solution, they say, is just to remove the authenticated Instagram user from the plugin settings, and add it again. I’m not quite sure if that’s the only thing that helped, as I’ve adjusted quite a few other things all around (HAProxy timeouts, Nginx timeouts, PHP maximum execution time, etc). But it seems like the right thing to start with.

Keep in mind that you should backup the current user’s settings for the plugin (screenshot or save the page as HTML or just copy-paste them somewhere), because they will be reset to the defaults when the user is re-added.

I have just now imported about 40 Instagram pictures that weren’t synchronized since the last September. Enjoy!

Accurate Instagram Filters Reconstruction

homm/color-filters-reconstruction is a GitHub repository with a number of tools that help to automatically or semi-automatically deconstruct the color filters applied to a picture by such services as Instagram, Google Photos, and others.

Here’s how it works:

This method is based on three-dimensional lookup tables and their two-dimensional representation: hald images. The core idea is simple: a sample hald image with a uniform color distribution is processed using a target color filter with an unknown transformation algorithm. The processed hald image can then be used as a filter for a very accurate approximation of that target color transformation.

A resulting hald image could then be used in various software such as GraphicsMagick or Adobe Photoshop. You can implement those hald images in your iOS or macOS app with CocoaLUT. Also, hald images could be converted to the 3D LUT cube file format, which is common in a great number of video editing software.

The Internet in real time

The Internet in real time provides a visual insight into how much activity is happening on the web every second. Counts for things like Facebook likes, tweets, and YouTube video views are updated every second, all on one page.

It fascinates me every time to see stuff like this, because, apart from the human activity in itself, I have a glimpse of an understanding of how much technology work is happening behind the scenes.

100 Social Media Facts and Statistics for 2015

Back in 2013 I linked to some (not so) surprising facts about social media. Two years is a lot of time and a lot of things has changed since. So here comes 100 social media facts and statistics for 2015. These spread from general statistics to service-specific ones, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, and others. Unlike many other similar collections, this one actually links to sources for every single fact, and provides an easy one-click share to Twitter button. Here are a few to get you started:

189 million Facebook users are ‘mobile only’.
There are 4 billion daily video views on Facebook.
50% of unique LinkedIn visitors access it via mobile.
There is a 50% average increase in comments when a LinkedIn page post contains a question.
Over 40 billion photos have been shared on Instagram.
Google+ has 300 million monthly active users around the world.
Google+ grows at a rate of 33% each year.
Average time spent on YouTube per mobile session is 40 minutes.
There are 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.