Spent today doing a proper cleanup under the hood. The site has moved to new hosting, loads noticeably quicker, and uses a fraction of the mobile data it used to.
New hosting. The site used to run on a small Google Cloud VM. It now runs entirely on Cloudflare's edge network, with GitHub Actions handling the overnight jobs that keep the camera list current. It's cheaper to run, there's no server sitting there to fall over at 2am, and pages now come back in about 50ms instead of waiting on a single machine. Your coffee money goes further.
The map loads much faster. It used to sit and wait for analytics and a big icon font to finish downloading before it would even start. Now it starts loading the moment the page does.
Way less mobile data. Camera feeds now stop refreshing when the tab is in the background or scrolled off screen. The Highway 417 page alone was quietly pulling over 200 MB an hour with the tab just sitting open — that's now a small fraction of it. If you leave the site open on your phone all day, this one's for you.
The full camera list is clickable now. All 464 cameras are listed at ottawa-traffic.com/cameras.html, and every name now takes you straight to that camera on the map. Handy if you know the intersection but not where it is on the map.
Shared links actually look right. Camera links posted to Reddit, Bluesky and Mastodon now show a preview of that camera instead of just my logo.
Fixed a battery drain where Gatineau video clips kept playing invisibly in the background after you'd moved on to another camera.
Favourited cameras now actually look different on the map — turns out the "highlighted" star was pixel-identical to a normal one this whole time. Oops.
Added a proper 404 page, plus a new guide on the homepage covering which roads and neighbourhoods the cameras actually cover, and where coverage is thin.