What's New

October 19, 2025

Major refactoring of all applications to simplify, standardize, and provide an improved foundation for future development. This is by far the largest update since the applications were originally developed and required reworking everything and timing them all to go out together. This update started almost a year ago and I am very happy to finally release this major update! Here are some of the highlights:

  • Rework UI to be more consistent with other apps, like theming and moving the primary nav from the top to the left
  • Move away from overly verbose MVC to RazorPages
  • Port dynamic tools/games to SolidJS, so we now use the same framework for all JS apps
  • Replace Bootstrap with Tailwind and DaisyUI
  • Deployed to new server, thanks to the old one for serving us well for a decade!
  • Auth0 is now used for authentication
  • Updates related to photos.mikeandwan.us:
    • Re-encoded all media to avif and av1 for better quality at reduced filesize
    • Authorization checks are now applied for all media
    • APIs and Media now served from a different url, and no longer has dependencies on www.mikeandwan.us
    • Many client application improvements - see release notes in their respective apps for more
  • Removed files.mikeandwan.us

Please let me know if you find any issues or have any difficulties on the new site. I am sure I've missed some things, so please let me know if you come across something.

Otherwise, things are pretty busy at the moment, and I am hoping to take a little break from this project over the next few weeks. I have a lot of ideas for future improvements, so keep an eye out for these in the coming months. Enjoy!

June 20, 2024

Minor updates to support the updated Android app (which will be slowly rolling out):

  • Added additonal functionality to the video API
  • Corrected an issue when trying to clear ratings for photos/videos
  • Misc. dependency updates

December 23, 2023

Multiple updates:

  • Upgrade to .NET 8 and numerous dependencies
  • Upgrade client libraries, in particular, Angular
  • Create an error with building CSS assets in the container build - then fix it =P

December 03, 2023

Minor system update:

  • Upgrade to PostgreSQL 16

November 15, 2023

Improved Search function within Photos Apps:

  • Data from reverse geocode is now included in search index, improving results when trying to find categories based on region
  • Significantly reduced index load time by using a cool feature in PostgreSQL (array_agg)

September 30, 2023

No user noticeable changes, but many updates under the hood:

  • Update all client js and css libraries/frameworks to their latest version
  • Replace webpack in favor of vite for the WebGL demos
  • Use pnpm rather than npm throughout projects
  • Simplify and optimize container builds
  • Update server side libraries to their latest versions

September 18, 2023

We're back baby! We lost power on Sept. 8 due to a nasty and unexpected storm that took down a big tree in our neighborhood which then broke a telephone pole. Unfortunately, once the pole and wires were fixed, we found out that our ONT also died. After far too many calls with Verizon, we finally got someone to come out and replace the ONT (which takes 2 minutes - if only we could buy the part to do this ourselves!).

Otherwise, there are a few minor updates:

  • Correct a bug in the API that was not properly sending create dates for photo and video categories
  • Update libraries

August 12, 2023

A few nice improvements:

  • Updates to support new version of the Photos application
  • Optimized server config to enable more compression, which should especially benefit mobile users
  • Runtime and libraries upgraded to latest versions

June 14, 2023

Minor dependency updates, nothing very interesting - we're still here =D

January 12, 2023

Finally completed some upgrades to backend services along with some other minor updates. What is particularly nice is that the Ansible deploy scripts fully automated the process! Nice to to see all that work continue to pay off! Check out the notable changes below:

  • Upgrade to Postgres 15
  • Upgrade to Redis 7
  • Upgrade to Solr 9
  • Upgrade client libraries and applications
  • Correct sort issue in Photos app