Over time, I've realized that my blog's front page looked a tad dull due to the absence of header images for some of the older posts. Hence, I decided to put AI-powered image generation platforms, DALL-E 2 and Midjourney, to the test. While DALL-E 2 offered some promising results, Midjourney stole the show with aesthetically pleasing images, despite the lack of API support and strict rules against automation. Despite these limitations, I managed to generate and download quality images from Midjourney, revamping my blog's appearance and learning a lot in the process.
My recent post was featured on Hacker News and rose to the number 2 spot, attracting over 45,000 requests or 29,000 unique IPs in a single day, a phenomenon known as the 'Hacker News Effect'. Since my Jekyll-generated site largely comprises static HTML, CSS and images and is hosted inexpensively on Amazon AWS with CloudFront, it was quite capable of handling this traffic surge. Utilizing CloudFront's traffic logs, I've created several visual representations to track and understand the flow of traffic geographically.