Can't Imagine How

I've had this ongoing problem with trying to separate my Display component from my Gallery component. Keeping the Display inside the Gallery was working, but it was obviously poor design, and it made the Gallery component much too complex. I've renamed Gallery to FilteredGallery, to differentiate from a much simpler component I'm using on my homepage (SimpleGallery - fetches a list and displays the first n images). Planning to make a RandomGallery that displays random selection, but haven't got there yet. Anyway, my ImageDisplay is slightly complicated because, while the image itself is pretty straightforward, the detail information gets tricky. I'm currently using Cloudinary's custom meta fields to store all the details associated with each image (e.g. title, description, medium, price, etc). Though I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to augment that at some point, it should be sufficient for the time being. However, the only way to input the meta field

So, as I may have mentioned, I got some very nice UX people to work on my project with me. After doing an impressive amount of user research, they came up with some preliminary mock-ups for some of the pages of my site. All I have to do is, you know, make my site look like their pictures. Which I somehow feel should be easier than it is turning out to be. Here is the mock-up of what my homepage should look like: And here is what my current homepage actually looks like: You can see the differences, right? Yeah, so did the designers. I suggested they could go ahead and put my site on their portfolios, now that it's live and all - get me some inbound links! And they were like, Um, sure, just as soon as the site, you know, looks like our design. This is the 6th carousel component I've tried out - called Alice Carousel (react-alice-carousel). There's a screenshot on the component's repo that looks exactly like the one in the mock-up: overlay Next and Pr

Just spent several very frustrating days trying to deploy my project to my domain, cantimaginewhy.com . Previously, I was using GitHub's gh-pages to deploy directly from my repo. But I also had this domain, on which I've been running a remarkably uninspired WordPress site for the past several years. Since my current hosting plan was set to expire today, I thought it would be a good time to launch my new React site. Which ended up being more complicated than I anticipated. I mean, ultimately it was pretty simple, but it was one of those bugs that took a really long time to correctly diagnose. Transferring my domain from Bluehost to NameCheap was pretty simple - $12.95 for a one-year private domain registration. I configured the domain to use GitHub (complicated, but very well documented), but then when I tried opening the site in my browser, I got a blank screen. Which made me think I'd done the configuration wrong somehow, because it was running fine on localhost, and it

For basic MVP, I really just need to have a working contact/order form. The same component can be used to contact me for general inquiries, or to indicate interest in buying a painting. Still thinking this can be done via GMail, without need for back end. Next steps: implement serverless email creation use for contact form create modal order form, launch from clicking 'Buy Original' button on product detail

The components that are currently doing pretty much exactly what I wanted are Gallery and GalleryNav. GalleryNav is the filter bar, which reads my filters from utils/sorting.js. This is just a JSON file of the form: {   "name":  Name of Filter  (eg Location),   "index": 0,   "options": [     {       "name":  Option Name  (eg Boston),       "tag":  tag to filter by ,       "thumbnail":  publicId of thumbnail image ,       "description":  text to display when option is selected     }   ] } NOTE:  The filters are predefined, in that the JSON file doesn't change unless I feel the need to edit them. But the search results can change any time I add or remove tags from my Cloudinary Console. That usually means deleting the corresponding tag .json file from Cloudinary's root directory; any time you query a tagname from Cloudinary (ie request 'winter.json' get all the images tagged with 'wint

 OK, getting down to brass tacks. (Why is that an expression, btw?) Anyway, here is my app structure so far: My menu is currently a Nav component within a Router in App.js. Home, About, and Contact are just page components. I have two versions of my homepage image carousel: one uses Bootstrap (ImageCarousel.jsx), and one uses Coverflow (ImageCarousel-cover.jsx). The Coverflow component looks more impressive, but it also doesn't do most of the things it says in its documentation (or at least, hasn't yet). The Bootstrap version is much closer to the design mockup, so I'm trying to move towards that, but CSS is giving me grief.

My design team and I just presented our work thus far at a little GA event, hosted by Kate Lodder. Beginning with SEI-02, Outcomes now encourages work on post-graduate projects, and today was the first presentation. We were the only group - everyone else did projects on their own. Which continues to baffle me; no one is ever going to hire you to create a full stack application by yourself, so why are we getting practice working alone? Anyway, the site currently looks like this: cantimaginewhy . Current features/things that are working: Carousel of favorites on Homepage Minimal info on About page Contact page has form Artwork page has working filters gallery image detail image zoom with watermark indication of pieces for sale, sometimes with price shown No search bar Things that are missing/not working (compared with UX mockup): Homepage carousel is sub-optimal & does not resemble mockup Homepage No Shop page (commented out of menu because it contains noth

This is a slight digression from talking about building my site so I can rant about free blogging platforms with which I have issues. This is not my first attempt at a blog. That was about 18 hours ago, and was on Wix's "free" tier. As the title suggests, I'm not a fan. I don't mind giving up some comforts in favor of not paying for stuff. But at least Blogger lets you pick your own subdomain. With Wix, it's your email address. If you want a different subdomain, use a different email address. Of course, they don't tell you that until you try to publish your first post, because they want you to upgrade in order to not have to use your email address as your website. Also, it turns out that once you pick a template, you can't change that, either. Unless you upgrade. Or create a new account, with a new email address. Anyway, Wix can suck it.

Architecture, like design, is not my favorite part. (One might wonder if I actually have any favorite parts; and if not, why on earth would I decide on software as a career field? All good questions.) Unfortunately, you have to make some decisions about architecture before you start coding, and they have to be good decisions. Otherwise you're going to waste a lot of time going down rabbit holes (trust me, not my first rodeo). The number one requirement of my site is that it needs to cost me nothing to operate. I'm willing to spend up to $20/year on domain registration, but that's it (see Site History ). Which means the only commercial technologies I'm going to be using are the ones that offer a free tier that is sufficient for my needs. Luckily, everything is scalable nowadays, so if I end up using too much bandwidth because my site is inexplicably popular, I can always upgrade. So, for starters, I'm going to deploy my front-end on GitHub's GH

I started putting my pictures online about 5 years ago; I couldn't think of a good domain name, but "cantimaginewhy.com" was available, so... My first site was just an HTML page with a JQuery plugin that connected to my Flickr account. That worked OK, except that it had to load from scratch every single time you opened a page, even if you were just moving between pages on the site. So not ideal. Also, no way to contact me. And since it was just a JQuery plugin that I had nothing to do with, it didn't do much to show off my awesome web development skills. Next I set up a WordPress site, with a WP plugin that fetched images from Flickr. I definitely like the idea of only needing to upload to one service, and then having my site pull updates from there. Using WordPress meant that it could do updates on the server-side, including generating thumbnails from images. That meant you didn't have to wait nearly as long for the page to load. Also, contact

Can't Imagine Why (cantimaginewhy.com) is the website I made to showcase my art. The name has no particular meaning, other than I needed a name and it was available. This blog is about my process of building it. I have some help on the design, but so far the coding is all me. Hopefully writing about it will at least help me get out of my own way and think more clearly, even if no one else ever reads it. I got the idea from one of my classmates at General Assembly, Chuck Curtiss . He started a blog to document the process of building a coding project. It seemed like such a good idea, I decided to copy it. That was about 2 months ago; I'm finally getting around to doing it. Here's an overview of my project. It's a site to display artwork, specifically mine. Additionally, it will allow users to purchase prints and other derived products, as well as original pieces. At this point, it's not so much an app as a site. The difference is that my users are