Archiving The Planet’s Oldest Webcam Feed

FogCam is the oldest webcam feed that’s nonetheless up and operating. Installed at San Francisco State University, it’s been slowly importing a brand new picture to the net each 20 to 60 seconds or so since September 30, 1994. Very few of these photographs have ever been saved, but [Justin Earl] has come along to fix that with Fog-Bank.

[Justin] was desperate to have top-notch protection of the FogCam, so arrange 4 separate catchers throughout three separate networks to scrape photographs from the feed. He runs one on his personal server, one on his dwelling machine, and two small applications operating on Cloudflare. Each catcher reviews the time it grabbed a recent picture from the positioning. FogCam has by no means changed a picture inside 19 seconds, so so long as one of many catchers grabs a picture no less than each 18 seconds, [Justin]’s system needs to be archiving the whole lot that’s being captured.

Currently the archive hosts over 169,000 photographs throughout 377 days, although the vast majority of that content material is from a 2019 archive effort when it was believed the digicam would quickly be shut down. More stats are available, too.

It’s not essentially the most attention-grabbing view within the global community, nevertheless it’s neat to see such a undertaking proceed operating lengthy sufficient to have a good time its thirty second birthday this week. We’ve featured other neat webcam-related content before, too. Meanwhile, you’ll be able to go check out the live feed if you wish to peer by means of FogCam your self.