Quant Error

The official blog of the image dithering web application Dither it!

Quarterly Report: Q4 2020

January 16, 2021

New year, same Quant Error.

First off, new functionality: it has been a while since I did anything more than some bug fixes, but this quarter I actually added functionality: palette import! Here is how it looks:

Basically, it is just an array of hex values that can be copied and pasted. Is it the most graceful solution? No, but it is simple and functional..at least I hope.

What else? Someone who works at google wrote a very thorough and cool article about dithering here: https://surma.dev/things/ditherpunk/. A lot of it is over my head but it's great. I would like to try and add Bayer dithering to Dither it! at some point...and maybe a synopsis of the portions relevant to Dither it!. Enough blathering, on to the numbers:

Unique Visits 5,100
Page Views 8,600
Image Uploads 10,000
Dithers 40,600
Countries 50

Again, numbers are up across the board (shout out @bennett4senate), except for countries which is the same. That might actually be a pretty unexciting number to track over time, so maybe I'll stop including it and replace it with something else. I should also figure out a way to chart this so it shows the values over time instead of me just narrating them. Maybe that will be the goal or Q1-2021. Also I should probably eventually paginate Quant Error..and like make it an actual blog? Not likely, ditherers.

Quarterly Report: Q3 2020

October 11, 2020

OK, what has been going on with Dither it! over the past three months? First of all, analytics:

Unique Visits 4,100
Page Views 7,400
Image Uploads 9,100
Dithers 39,000
Countries 50

Much to everyone's surprise, all the numbers are higher again. To some extent, this might be due to getting randomly linked to from a Hacker News comment..but I don't think that can explain all of the growth. Over 10,000 more dithers than the previous quarter, almost 3,000 more uploads.

What else? Reading through the Q2 entry I mentioned that it might be fun to look at the top 10 sources of traffic, which I guess is better than doing nothing, so here goes that:

  1. 1. Google, obviously, by far the largest referrer, like 10 fold over the next highest
  2. 2. Hacker News
  3. 3. Bing
  4. 4. DuckDuckGo
  5. 5. Reddit
  6. 6. Tiny Helpers
  7. 7. https://kokorobot.ca/
  8. 8. Facebook
  9. 9. Twitter
  10. 10. Are.na

Perhaps unsurprising that most of the top referrers are some of the top sites on the net, but good work Tiny Helpers and kokorobot for your outsize contributions.

Ok, enough of that, onward to showing some things people have done with Dither it!

BAMPFA'S PRESERVING GUERRILLA TELEVISION

BAMPFA released a great archive of old TVTV footage, interviews, etc and used Dither it! some of the decorative gifs. Check it here.

@pondcell

Twitter user @pondcell made some very cool digital artwork using Dither it! to get some added texture

The Dithering.

Fred at https://fdisk.space/ included Dither it! in a very nice write up about dithing, image compression etc. Thanks Fred!

Quarterly Report: Q2 2020

July 28, 2020

Oh my god, I am actually doing a second Quant Error entry. As always (meaning the one previous time I have done this) we start by looking at the numbers

Unique Visits 3,400
Page Views 5,800
Image Uploads 6,400
Dithers 28,400
Countries 45

Numbers are up across the board, with the exception of number of countries. I will have to do some additional research to determine whether this correllates to a general decrease in the number of countries.

Of particular note, the number of dithers is up almost 50% from Q1, despite far less significant increases in number of visitors and page views. Hopefully this means that people are really dithering a lot of stuff, and not that something is broken so they are having to try over and over to get it to work correctly (we'll never know!) I think a goal for some future update is to encourage some mechanism of actually seeing what people are dithering, maybe a hashtag or something. In the meantime, please share what you are dithering with me!

What else?

I did, in the last few months, create a plugin for phpBB that dithers images uploaded by users. Behold, phpbb-dither-it v1.0. With this release, Dither it! is officially a startup on the cutting edge of tech.

Oh also, thanks to a user tip I fixed a bug that was limiting the dithering to 8 colors, despite the palette showing more..so now you can select any number of colors and it will really use them all. Oops that this didn't work before!

OK, nothing else to say for this quarter. Note to self for next time if there is nothing to talk about: it might be fun to look at the top ten sources of traffic or something like that. Ok bye.

Quarterly Report: Q1 2020

April 11, 2020

Welcome to the inaugural post of Quant Error, the Dither it! blog. The first quarter of 2020 has been a wild ride for Dither it!, and I would like to highlight some of what has been going on.

First, let's look at the numbers:

Unique Visits 3,000
Page Views 5,200
Image Uploads 6,100
Dithers 19,600
Countries 50

Over 3000 unique viewers visited Dither it! 5200 times from over 50 countries. While here, these users uploaded over 6000 images and dithered those images almost 20,000 times. That's a lot of dithering.

While I generally do not get to see most of the images that are being dithered, sometimes folks get in touch to let me know they have used Dithered it!. I love seeing these projects and would like to highlight a few here:

Yacht's Bandcamp

Portland/LA band Yacht re-did their bandcamp recently with all-dithered versions of their album covers.

Circa

Web comic Circa used Dither it! to style their character portraits. They made use of the Atkinson algorithm, using the Serprentine option. Great to see people using some of these more esoteric features:

Timothée Goguely

French designer and developer Timothée Goguely, who was kind enough to add Dither it! to Product Hunt, dithered various imagery on his personal site and twitter account.

That's it for the first ever Dither it! Quarterly Report.

Thanks,
Alex