#technical notes

Goat or sheepskin are plausible options for the leather covers [website #1]

I initially thought that the binding could be coptic stitching but I think [this] is more appropriate, given the available references.

I’ll be ordering a sample pack of bookpaper and dyeing it with tea to see if it holds. I HAVE A STACK OF ACTUAL OLD PAPER THAT CAN TAKE FOUNTAIN PEN JUST FINE!! life is incredible il ove it [bookpaper]

Buy some book-cover cardboards from that store! (note to self: buy it A4 and cut it accordingly)

The metal corners might need some testing before I try to make one

Michael’s handwriting has pretty wide, uneven line spacing and looping d’s and J’s (if the writing is translated to Latin alphabets of vaguely similar shapes)

The Celestial Record actually seems to be roughly an A5 size book!! I was so happy when I found out ejrhtjk

Note to staff:

Still though - ease up on the jQuery guys, we don't need a zillion animated cross-fading transitions, we need speed and performance and reliability. Tumblr STILL makes my laptop's fans kick in in the way that only heavy Flash sites do.

Which is partly due to content, which isn't your fault - GIFs are notoriously inefficient and can't be tasked to the GPU. But also, you're  taxing the GPU with layered CSS transparency, animation and crossfade effects over the top of them.

But what you can do is not serve GIFs in the original format. 

Maybe take a leaf from Twitter: When you post a GIF there, they actually convert it into looping H.264 video, which as you know is a zillion times more efficient, about 10x smaller, way more mobile-friendly for people on restricted data plans, and even a smartphone's GPU can cut through it like butter.

Yeah, means you have to build a scalable GIF-to-MP4/WebM rendering cluster, but you're smart folks and you have Yahoo! money now. 

And still, when you reblog something, WHY do you need to load the Dashboard underneath the compose modal? That means the client side is loading a lot of heavy graphics and front-end code that isn't even being used half the time. Totally inefficient!

Maybe the compose/reblog code is part of the Dashboard? To me the smart thing to do is modularize that code and split it out into its own library, so that you can compose your reblog from wherever you are.

And smarter still: Make 'reblog' a choice to reblog as-is (without invoking the compose modal at all!) or reblog with comments. 

Not telling you how to do your job, of course :)