about the website / author
Wallbase.net can simply be described as a searchable wallpaper database, and it strives to be little more than that. It is powered by an image+metadata scraper which pulls images from 4chan's /w/, /wg/ and /hr/ boards. The script then takes the raw parsed data (post title, img title, text), does some processing on the images, and indexes everything in a MySQL database.
The main person behind all of this is
yotoon! - I designed, optimized and coded basically everything you see here (except some parts of the scraper program, which is taken from the old 4scrape's website). If you have any questions or comments, please use the
Comments subpage or feel free to e-mail me at the mail provided below. Thanks. :)
Wallbase
technicalities
The scraper is written in
Python 2.5. It uses the Python Image Library (PIL) to process the images (which means it can't handle interlaced PNGs...). The scraper not only pulls images, but all the information contained in the posts -- this contextual data allows the images to be searched.
The frontend is a mash of (x)HTML and
jQuery, which is a really nice library for JavaScript that makes everything fairly painless. Client-side scripts depends on a fairly fast php framework that provides all the necessary searching/inserting/updating. The frontend makes queries through the pseudo-API and generates pages on the client (which is annoying for SEO purposes, but is needlessly nice to the server).
The entire thing is running on a Linux Ubuntu machine hosted by
OVH (Server is located in France).
Some software I use:
- — Linux Ubuntu (server edition)
- — Lighttpd web server (site frontend)
- — Nginx web server (image backend)
- — PHP + eAccelerator (as FastCGI)
- — MySQL
- — Memcache
- — IQDB image search
other...
If you're not familiar with *chan structure, searching is done through 3 main categories/boards:
—
/wg/ : Wallpaper / General - self explanatory...
—
/w/ : Wallpaper / Anime - mainly manga&anime wallpapers
—
/hr/ : High Resolution - huge, high quality photos (most of images in there are not plain wallpapers)
Additionally, some wallpapers are tagged as
NSFW (Not suitable for work/school),
Sketchy (Not entirely clean but not a NSFW also. Something in between) or
SFW (Safe wallpapers)
The main rule for this website is to keep the images on a certain level of quality. I mean, I don't allow any child pornography, desktops, highly offensive wallpapers on wallbase.net, but if you spot any disturbing images, please mark them for deletion. Thanks!
Oh, and some of the description is originally from 4scrape (the best wallpaper website of its time).
If you have any questions or concerns regarding this service, feel free to use the
Comments section or drop me an e-mail - yotoon [at] wallbase.net.
thanks!
Lastly I want to say thank you to the users who supported me, gave me ideas and inspiration regarding wallbase.net. You know who you are. (Yes I'm talking about you too
Tomat ;) )