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Showing posts from November, 2019

State rendering problem caused by not understanding state

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

Implementing UX Design

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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

Deployment Issues

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