I made this project. It was first posted to Hacker News a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35985221. I’m sharing it again now because this time of year is generally your best chance to catch an impression of The Great Wave on display.
About The Great Wave: the original woodblock prints were mass-produced around 1830, but only a limited number of those impressions survive today. They’re sensitive to light and are rarely exhibited—typically about once every four years. That’s why I built this site: to help people time their visits and have a chance to see one in person. Art lovers will understand the appeal of seeing a classic like this up close. Others may find the idea pointless or ridiculous. So it goes.
About the Site: it tracks the display status of various impressions of Katsushika Hokusai’s "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" (神奈川沖浪裏) across museums worldwide. I monitor official museum collection pages and check for changes in “on view” status. In the ~30 years I’ve been interested, I’ve only managed to see two different impressions, and I want to see as many as I can.
The backend is powered by a series of Huginn scenarios that scrape museum websites on a schedule and track changes. Not every museum has a suitable website for this, but enough do to make the project worthwhile. The hardest part was initially finding all the relevant collection pages, understanding the structure of their data, and setting up the automation. I also run automated searches for press releases and news articles to catch anything the scrapers might miss. The whole process is largely hands-off, with only a final manual check before publishing updates.
Over the past two years, I’ve simplified and optimized the system. The final data is compiled into a small CSV file, which is used to generate the web page and an RSS feed. These are cached as static files and are only updated when there’s new information. The files are hosted on a free Oracle Cloud Compute Instance running Caddy web server. That’s pretty much it!
msephton•8mo ago
About The Great Wave: the original woodblock prints were mass-produced around 1830, but only a limited number of those impressions survive today. They’re sensitive to light and are rarely exhibited—typically about once every four years. That’s why I built this site: to help people time their visits and have a chance to see one in person. Art lovers will understand the appeal of seeing a classic like this up close. Others may find the idea pointless or ridiculous. So it goes.
About the Site: it tracks the display status of various impressions of Katsushika Hokusai’s "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" (神奈川沖浪裏) across museums worldwide. I monitor official museum collection pages and check for changes in “on view” status. In the ~30 years I’ve been interested, I’ve only managed to see two different impressions, and I want to see as many as I can.
The backend is powered by a series of Huginn scenarios that scrape museum websites on a schedule and track changes. Not every museum has a suitable website for this, but enough do to make the project worthwhile. The hardest part was initially finding all the relevant collection pages, understanding the structure of their data, and setting up the automation. I also run automated searches for press releases and news articles to catch anything the scrapers might miss. The whole process is largely hands-off, with only a final manual check before publishing updates.
Over the past two years, I’ve simplified and optimized the system. The final data is compiled into a small CSV file, which is used to generate the web page and an RSS feed. These are cached as static files and are only updated when there’s new information. The files are hosted on a free Oracle Cloud Compute Instance running Caddy web server. That’s pretty much it!