FBN
FBN was also an active member of the ACD forums and the Channels forums. He lived in rural Virginia, USA and I live in the UK so we mostly communicated through the internet, only meeting a few times in Amsterdam.
Sadly FBN died in January 2023. Many people shared their memories of him on the ACD forum here. With a lot of help from his friends and family, I managed to adopt his website and save it from disappearing.
(If you don't know or care about HTML and the internals of websites, you might want to skip this bit.)
When I first tried to add a new menu to one of the pages on the site I found some interesting stuff going on. FBN had been doing everything by hand and it appeared that he'd made various attempts to add styles in the past. These were mostly overriding each other so the only effect was to centralise the text. There were acres of code that was not really doing anything. Fortunately the pages mostly functioned and were quite readable despite all this.
My roots are in commercial database applications and, for most of the first 20 years of the ACD, it was hosted on some free space where only static pages were possible. To get most out of this I slapped together a database on my PC to store the details of the coffeeshops and made some simple programs to generate a set of web pages from the data. I could then upload the whole set to make a website that was reasonably easy to update.
On taking over coffeeshopmenus, I decided to do that the same way. First I wrote a one-off program to read through the existing site and scrape the data out of it. This was a bit tricky because the pages were quite inconsistent but I think I got most of it in the end. Having got the data into a database, I then wrote programs to regenerate the site again.
The new version is massively simplified internally whilst retaining as much as possible of the look and feel that FBN had created. I like to think he would approve of what I've done with it.
FBN was using a US company to host the site and maintain the coffeeshopmenus.org domain name. I took over his account there but renewing for another year would have been quite expensive.
I've been paying for the coffeeshopdirect.com domain name for the ACD for decades and for the past few years I've also been renting server space to host the site. The package I have for this can support two sites with their own domains so I moved FBN's site onto the same server as the ACD. I'm still retaining the domain name in the States but it now points to the server in the UK.
The flow of menus arriving here at ACD Towers has increased steadily over the time that I've been running the site. Modern cameras, even phones, take large hi-res pictures that occupy lots of disk space.
The package from the hosting company is capped at 10GB, which is quite a lot of space really. Nevertheless, we are currently using 7.92GB (Feb 25) 8.89GB (Aug 25) 9.56GB (Jan 26) and growing steadily.
For years FBN and I considered server space to be virtually unlimited. We uploaded pictures of any size and any format. It's only in recent years that I've become conscious of the rate at which this was consuming available space.
Trimming the edges off photos. I tend to cut quite tightly to the actual strain names and prices, removing background and decoration. This makes the picture smaller and also makes the text bigger if you're reading on a small screen like a phone. Incidentally, if some important piece of information is cut off some picture it's usually because that's the way I received it. Feel free to email me if you think I've accidentally chopped off something I shouldn't have, though.
When FBN started this site, digital cameras were quite primitive. Getting a readable picture of a menu was tricky. Mostly results were small and blurry so it was important to retain what detail there was by not resizing or compressing the image further.
These days it's very different. Only very large hi-res screens can display modern photos full size. Your browser will resize the image to fit your screen. You can zoom in to parts of the image up to the resolution of the photo, beyond which it will become pixelated. In most cases this is way beyond the size required to read the text, though.
More recently I've begun to shrink very large pictures down to around the size of an HD TV to save space. Most of the photos I receive are already jpegs. These days I always compress them all as jpegs. Each one is processed individually so I try to ensure that readability is not compromised.
Some coffeeshop menus remain fairly constant for years, notably 420 Café, while others change every few days. Updates on this site rely on people like you happening to visit the shop, photographing the menu and sending it to me, so they're more erratic.
Occasionally I receive several virtually identical menus for the same shop over a few days. In those cases I sometimes skip the duplicates to save time and space.