About Consolia

I would classify Consolia as technical and weird (I guess it rubs off?), but I also have a passion for simplifying technology to a point anyone can understand. I occasionally write explanation comics where i aim to do exactly this. I'm also working on a book that takes this to the next level. So if you know any publishers, let me know!

Consolia updates on monday mornings, to help you through the hard times.

About the author

I'm Tim, a programmer. I have been a back-end developer for about 13 years now. I have been programming since i was 9; building calculators and tiny silly games in Visual Basic before discovering web technologies at age 15. I've been freelancing in software development since i was 16 and had founded three companies before i turned 19.

Beyond programming, my interests extend to physics, mathematics, messing around with electronics (amateur style), also some nerd stuff (reading books, comics, manga).

Architecture behind Consolia

Consolia architecture

Some details

Some noteworthy details about the setup:

  • The back-end API is open source, you can check it out on GitHub.
  • The dashboard (cron) keeps track of upvotes & comments on Reddit, 9gag, Cheezburger, Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, using their API where possible.
  • The top 9 comics (based on the sum of upvotes) appear on the website as favs. So long as i don't forget to create a thumbnail for them.
  • There's an open API too. When publishing a comic it automatically generates static JSON files - nginx sends along the proper content type. Of course it only regenerates the last comic and the index. Detail call example.
  • Even though i have a backoffice + API, i still add comics using scp & mysql directly. I like to tell myself it's less work.