Building in public — week 5

Another week, mixed bag.

The main blocker is still HN karma. Sitting at 4, need 10+ for Show HN. Been leaving technical comments every day — libvips internals, AVIF encoder tradeoffs, Rust FFI stuff — but it just doesn't move. Not sure if it's timing, thread selection, or just how HN works for new accounts. Either way, Show HN moves to week 6.

What did happen: added Convertify to Wellfound and SourceForge this week. Small wins but both are DR80+ so it adds up over time. Also published a piece on TIFF in 2026 — researched the format properly and honestly it's kind of fascinating how dead it is on the web but still everywhere in print and professional workflows.

Also started PDF conversion. Using libvips pdfload instead of calling poppler directly — whole backend is already libvips so adding a separate dependency felt wrong. The tricky part is the probe load to get page count before processing, still working out the multi-page output strategy.

GSC is moving in the right direction — 52 pages indexed now, was 33 two weeks ago. Impressions are there, clicks still basically zero because everything sits around position 40. Need to crack top 20 on at least a few queries for that to change.