How a Bake Off led to .HEIC and .WEBP support

This week we had an 18a Bake Off! We can't have our usual Christmas Party so we're going to try to do a few Christmassy things via Zoom - and we started with everyone needing to bake something on the theme of a "Snowman".

My son was our judge - as we're all working from home he was going to witness the results after school so by him being a judge it meant everyone in the company could take part. He also selected the theme. My entry involved Jammie Dodgers and Oreos meaning it was a little light on the "baking" but I was also still working whilst everyone else had the afternoon to focus on their creations!

We used our community engagement tool Iszy to let everyone upload photos of their masterpieces as they went - which of course upped the competition when you could see what other people were doing! Iszy then lets me very easily embed a widget of the images I've approved below so you can see what we got up to.

During this process though, Tom found his phone was now taking images as .HEIC files by default - rather than .pngs or .jpgs, and so Iszy wouldn't accept them. Therefore, his first job the next day was to add support for these next generation image files, along with .WEBP files which we've been generating on a lot of sites for clients this year to help with speed and search engine optimisation.

This highlighted yet again how quickly technology moves on and how much effort there is in supporting features on websites. A client who used Iszy for an International Summit recently, with delegates from all over the world, didn't have time to develop all of the image uploading, sharing and moderating tools Iszy has in place out of the box and with the sands constantly shifting with regards to what people need, it quickly becomes too much for individual websites to keep up with the latest demands. Using a tool such as Iszy means you can leave all of the security and technology updates to the experts and get on with running your business. 

If you would like to hear the technical side of how we added .HEIC and .WEBP support, you can read it here. Or if you'd rather just look at some pretty(ish) cakes, please scroll down!