I was thinking lately besides the image galleries themselves also about how the other sections of the site will be, like the tutorials and articles about fractals I might include here. I am not a mathematician myself, and as I’ve mentioned somewhere else, I am more interested in the artistic and visual part of the fractal world and I have never studied them from that scientific point of view, nor am I able to write anything technical myself about them. My experience would be more in the graphical aspects and maybe in the operational part of certain softwares – how to get a better printable image, how to fix a few things, how to achieve some feature in a software… but nothing beyond this point. But… sometimes a few concepts should be understood even if briefly – if you want to go deeper or not, it’s up to you – so some of your fractal creations can be a little better understood as well so to speak if you know even a little about what is happening, as in “why a certain image has more details than others?” or “why does this formula X give me all these spirals?”, “why is there a black spot in my image?” and so on.

There are many more talented people mostly in the mathematical/scientific side of the fractal world that have written articles and made countless websites describing what are fractals, how do they “behave”, chaos theory, their applications in several aspects of science and they have made articles in a way that I would never be able to do, mostly in the technical side. I will try to sometimes replicate some of these ideas and concepts (always quoting the original authors!) and occasionally I’ll try to add simpler posts about specific subjects in the fractal world like for instance “what are iterations?”, but in a very brief and simple way, the way how I understood that subject so to speak and in a way that I could pass it along that others would also comprehend these concepts, but with additional supporting links to these more deeper articles for the visitors that are more interested in the technical aspects of the fractals, which is not usually my cup of tea for my lack of advanced skills in mathematics or just because they are too nerdy for my tastes and start to get boring after a while if you’re not a scientist, amateur or not. I won’t get too deep though (I’ll use a few iterations!), just trying to touch the surface of these subjects, enough for you to understand the basic concepts.

Iterations

The noun iteration comes from the Latin verb iterum, which means “again,” which makes a lot of sense when you consider the meaning of the word, “the act of repeating.” (Source)

1. noun doing or saying again; a repeated performance
2. noun (computer science) executing the same set of instructions a given number of times or until a specified result is obtained “the solution is obtained by iteration” synonyms: looping
3. noun (computer science) a single execution of a set of instructions that are to be repeated “the solution took hundreds of iterations” synonyms: loop type of: physical process, process a sustained phenomenon or one marked by gradual changes through a series of states

The next update is taking a bit longer than I wanted but that’s because I’m rendering some of the Mandelbulbs again with better quality whenever possible (or when it’s worth it) and also I’m trying to use the Monte Carlo rendering on them, some fractals don’t really change or improve with it but some get interesting new features regarding the lights and textures (and even the original colours). Some of the original Mandelbulbs were slightly edited/tweaked to fix small things, and a couple more images have appeared from some of these tweaks. That’s the problem with fractals, mostly with these in 3D: you start exploring an image and you end up in another world with a zillion new images. I’m also learning some new techniques that I might use in future images…

9 galleries of Jwildfire images done, 180 images! I might try to recreate some of these images using the GPU render mode whenever possible to see what happens. If there are significant differences and the results are nicer images, they might be added.

Next step: Mandelbulb 3D images. I’ll check their sizes and maybe render them again with the best quality possible to avoid ugly parts like spots, etc. and also I might try to render some using the Monte Carlo (path tracing) rendering, which sometimes gives great results and very nice and much more natural looking images with nice shadows and lights.

This is a test. It’s the most viewed video of my fractal animations in my Youtube channel (but it’s not my favourite…). I had to allow the embedding of the video to make it work. It’s not the perfect method to have them posted here. I really don’t want it to work like this, other people might be able to embed the video in their own websites as well… I will not be publishing all the videos I make here if the only way is to let them be embedded, I’d rather just use the link to the video instead.

Time to start fine tuning the site along with performing occasional updates. The most boring part of the work is mostly done.

5 galleries of Jwildfire images are finished. Their thumbnails aren’t very attractive and are too dark but the images are very nice, in a different style of both UltraFractal and Fractint. I also found around new 70 Ultrafractal images that weren’t posted in the galleries of the old version of the site, these would be added to the UltraFractal galleries here after I finish the JWF ones (almost done, I think there are just 2 or 3 more galleries to be added). These images need to be edited as well. I think these were done in another computer and I’m not sure if their parameters were saved. I also had some problems editing galleries and menus (so confusing!) but I think it’s fixed as well.

Also when I found these images in the old backups of the site I also did some virus scan just out of nowhere because I remember getting some reports of problems in the site from the old host once (they apparently cleaned it and moved all the infected files to a folder named something.old but I never checked what was going on as they said it was “fixed”). In these old backups there were over 400 files infected with some kind of Trojan, all files of a certain stats plugin (a famous one!) which I don’t use anymore and had stopped used there as well since these reports. I remembered about it when browsing something in Google looking if my pages were being indexed etc. and there was this report that “1200 pages were not indexed” (how so? I never had that many pages), pages that weren’t part of the site at all and seemed to be just ads or popups or stuff loading other URLs etc. I hosted a forum in my site a long time ago and some other site, these might have been the actual infected files as phpBB is a common target for attacks, but these sections were discontinued since 2008 or something, but I still had a backup of all the databases – the hacked files weren’t the databases, though, and the database used here is entirely new.

Apparently the new version of the site is fine as nothing was really transferred over from the old site to this new version, I just used the same images but these came from another clean version I had made in larger sizes, so they might be safe and clean.

The traffic to the site has been minimal so far but I think it’s expected, it’s just a month since it was restarted. It will be a long process to be noticed again, and people don’t really pay attention to websites anymore more than they do to social media pages. What is funny is that my Jetpack plugin still keeps track of the site since the first installation (I guess Google Analytics does the same), and when I reinstalled it it came back with the numbers and stats of the old version plus all from this one (30 visitors so far…)… there were over 70,000 visitors to the site since the very start… at some point there were 1500 visitors in a day… I hope it will get back to that visibility soon, mostly when I start posting tutorials and articles about fractals in general instead of just images.