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Two months in inner Mongolia
- DrScump 11y agoThis interesting look at the darker side of what is happening in Inner Mongolia (environmental effect of rare earth mining) was posted on HN two days ago: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-...
- Jack000 11y agothankfully the Chinese monopoly on rare earth metals has been slipping in the last few years. http://dailysignal.com/2015/01/16/free-markets-smash-chinese-rare-earth-minerals-monopoly/ http://dailysignal.com/2015/01/16/free-markets-smash-chinese...
- th3iedkid 11y agoquoting.. >>Technology companies continually urge us to upgrade; to buy the newest tablet or phone. But I cannot forget that it all begins in a place like Bautou, and a terrible toxic lake that stretches to the horizon.
- andyjohnson0 11y agoLink to comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9317003
- contingencies 11y agoSome great imagery in there Jack, I particularly liked the timelapses and the presentation. I live in Yunnan, where we have our own ghost cities! My favourite northern dish is 老虎菜 (laohucai). Also, don't they have alcoholic horse milk up there? That would be great to try.
- baby 11y agoThe layout is completely buggy on firefox, I have to move and find the right position for the picture to load.
- lqdc13 11y agoSame. The videos take forever to load because they're loaded in a lazy fashion so they don't begin being downloaded until you are looking at empty space. Also it seems like each one is several megabytes in size.
- Jack000 11y agowhat aspect ratio, and on pc or mobile? It currently just shows the slide that covers the majority of the screen, which could be a bad assumption in certain cases. The videos are large by design, I just wanted them to look a bit better than youtube videos. The 4k versions are up to 20Mb, but I was hoping preloading the next two slides would help with that.
- shinta42 11y agowhat tech is behind the website? real cool
- andrewdon 11y agothis is beautiful
- BrandonWatson 11y agoWhat tool was used to build this? I've tried Aesop a while ago, but the integration with Wordpress on a selfhosted site wasn't for what I had hoped.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- ddrmaxgt37 11y agoLooks like it's a static site served up by S3
- Jack000 11y agothe backend is just a bash script I wrote (github above) that compiles to a static site. It really needs a lot more work before I'd want to release it though.
- rattray 11y agoI'm on the tail end of a year of traveling through Asia, and this really resonated with me. I loved the presentation and wish I had done something similar. What equipment did you use for photography etc?
- Jack000 11y agothanks! I mostly used a panasonic GX7. Easy to carry everywhere I go.
- kgabis 11y agoWhat lenses did you use?
- Jack000 11y agoso I had the kit lens, the 20mm 1.7 I used for walking around. I have a few legacy primes for long shots, and a 14mm semi-wide. Mind you I'm not a great photographer, just picked the best kit under my budget at the time. Japan was the first time I used a real camera. At web-resolutions it really doesn't matter much I think. The resolving power of almost all modern lenses are greater than 4k.
- ddrmaxgt37 11y agoI think this is the static site generator he developed and used for the site: https://github.com/Jack000/expose https://github.com/Jack000/expose
- Jack000 11y agoI'm planning on refactoring it actually, it's a bit ugly at the moment.
- ddrmaxgt37 11y agoLooking forward to it. The concept and current execution are great.
- century19 11y agoI agree, I really liked it, the mix of photos and videos really works. And it loaded fine for me.
- rcaught 11y agoI really like the format and the content Jack. It wasn't overly dense as text heavy journals can sometimes be, and it was refreshingly immersive with the short videos. I've also seen this format work to great effect with NY Times articles, and I for one enjoy consuming stories this way. I found the seat-belt warning disablers and the local toll booth especially interesting.
- RobotCaleb 11y agoVery cool! Thanks for sharing. What dish is pictured in the last couple images of food? The caption over it mentions KangBaShi new area.
- Jack000 11y agoI think that was the "finger mutton" http://www.echinacities.com/news/Hohhot-Local-Food#05 http://www.echinacities.com/news/Hohhot-Local-Food#05
- mixmastamyk 11y agoNeat, took me a few minutes to realize/remember that it is China and not Mongolia, might help to make it more clear. Had to google Ordos, an interesting story I wasn't aware of. I loved it, but had trouble reading the tiny, thin, white text over the photos. I know shadows are out, but it would help legibility. I used Firefox and it worked fine.
- rokhayakebe 11y agoI wish a handful of folks got together, got crowd funded and travelled the world to cover cities and places in such a way.
- hitlin37 11y agoNice website there.
- floSchr 11y agoCool format, but the fade-ins are way too slow, When i first opened the page i thought the images / videos were loading very slow, because i was greeted with a bunch of colored blocks while i scrolled downwards.
- mrweasel 11y agoI really love the content, the photos are beautiful, but the presentation is terrible. It seems that most like the format, but I don't see it as an efficient way of presenting the content. Honestly I would prefer to just wait while all the content loads initially. The scrolling really doesn't work otherwise, I initially scrolled by a couple of images because I didn't think there was suppose to be images or videos to all the images. Lovely content, gimmicky presentation.
- chanux 11y agoYou might like this http://paulstamatiou.com/photos/ http://paulstamatiou.com/photos/
- Jack000 11y agoMost of the compromises in the design comes from accommodating video. I originally preloaded almost everything, but found that even two videos in the DOM bogs down the browser and makes scrolling laggy. Anyways, I'm still working on it so feedback is welcome. My current thought is to do away with the fading and serve up placeholder images for the videos until they load.
- davedx 11y agoFWIW I really liked the presentation. I think placeholders for the videos is all that is needed. :)
- bane 11y agoThis is really beautiful. I absolutely enjoyed reading this, brings back fond memories of National Geographics when I was a kid. I actually enjoyed how the photos don't load until the frame is entirely in view, it kind of made me hold my breath excitedly for the next gorgeous photo to fade in.
- gabemart 11y agoIt's a very beautiful presentation. In terms of performance, perhaps you could: i) use domain sharding for pre-loading all the images. ii) Keep the current system for loading and removing videos, but create a placeholder image for each video that's a capture of the first frame of the video. This might make scrolling past videos a little easier. Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed the site as-is. Thanks for sharing it with us.
- seanccox 11y agoThis is among the most beautifully presented travel accounts I have encountered. The site ran flawlessly for me in Chrome, but was a bit jerky in Firefox. Still, it was such an engaging combination of content that my initial reaction was: "I should book a ticket today."
- throwaway999666 11y ago> I can't help but laugh at the American imagery on the vehicles, a symbol of authority that requires no translation. How sad.
- tapirl 11y agogreat photos. The texts are too small.
- juhq 11y agoI just came here to comment on how awful the scrolling is. I literally can not read anything on the page because the scrolling is horrible.
- bane 11y agoThis is great, I really enjoyed the presentation, photos and descriptions...some of which sent me spiraling off into wikipedia for more information. I hope the author mostly ignores the HN community's incessant need to pretend like any interface that's not a button marked "push for stuff" or doesn't work on some oddball gizmo has something wrong with it. This is beautiful work.
- Jack000 11y agothanks! There are a lot of negative feedback about the scrolling, that's something I'll definitely have to work on.
- realusername 11y agoOn my case that's the opposite, I really really liked the scrolling, it adds a really nice touch to the story. I just wish the text would have a bit more contract in some of the pictures. But otherwise it's really good, thanks for sharing this !
- djcrayon 11y agoI completely agree with this comment, while I like to assume people are being helpful this whole thread is coming off a bit too nitpicky on the interface. The story and pictures/video were simply amazing, and the way it displayed was excellent. Having just listened to Dan Carlin's Wrath of the Khans (http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-43-wrath-of-the-khans-i/ http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-43-wrath-o...), the presentation really helped with some of the visuals and cultural references on the podcast.
- mc32 11y agoIf you liked the photography, I think you'll like Hin Chua's work[1]. His work has a narrative arc. He weaves beautiful stories through his great eye and curation. [1]https://www.flickr.com/photos/hinius/16964929475/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/hinius/16964929475/
- unicornporn 11y ago
- pmontra 11y agoWonderful narrative but an awful show on a phone. The images keep disappearing when I scroll. I can see them sometimes, then they are replaced by a block of solid color. Some images never come back, some do.
- davidgerard 11y agoUsing a perfectly normal copy of Firefox on Xubuntu, the text is way too hard to read - enough so that I had to give up, sorry.
- dccoolgai 11y agoThis is incredible storytelling. I had never heard of Ordos before - it looks amazing.
- devy 11y agoPretty good shots. I was browsing the other Asian destinations in @Jack000's blog. Noticed that in the photo blog about Japan trip in 2014, he snapped a BMW i3 and called it "unreleased"[1]. That was inaccurate. BMW i3 was long been rumored in the auto news. First i3 delivery took place in London November 2013 (mass production started in Sept 2013). Btw, the raw material of i3's carbon fiber unibody was made in Japan [2]. [1]: http://jack.ventures/japan-2014/09/2560.jpg http://jack.ventures/japan-2014/09/2560.jpg [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_i3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_i3
- delive 11y agoAmazing photos. Normally I can't make it through long picture streams, but your captions really seemed to keep me interested. I actually thought the lazy loading + scrolling worked very well. On one slide, you mention the locals setup a toll checkpoint. It looks like you just drive right through without paying. Is it just a one way 'courtesy' checkpoint?
- Jack000 11y agoThere were actually two groups, each responsible for a single direction. I started recording after we paid and passed the first group.
- dominotw 11y agoHaving been listening to an audio book called 'travels in siberia' on my way to work. Travel to central asia has become my new obsession.
- machinelearning 11y agoThe interface was great! I loved the static video as it gave the reader a sense of what it was like to be present at the scene as opposed to a stylized shot that gives the reader an unrealistic representation of the scene.
- willchang 11y agoThe pictures stopped loading halfway through, but up to that point, I was entranced. Even the writing, by itself, is fun to read. It's rare to see someone with talent in both visual and textual forms. Edit: Blame rests with my crappy Comcast connection, not with the website.