Getting back to it

I took some time off from working on my site; my reasons are irrelevant to this discussion. The important thing is, I'm back now, and have made a couple of improvements since the last time I worked on this blog. They are:


  1. The Featured Artwork on the Home page now shows 4 random images. If you refresh the page, you'll see different images. They all come from a pool of about 30 images tagged with "favorite," so they're all among my best work (based on my own subjective opinion). The mechanism for this is a simple implementation of the Fisher-Yates algorithm to shuffle the images and then grab the first 4 (though the same component could be used to randomly select an arbitrary number of random images).
  2. On the Artwork page, the gallery of thumbnails on the left is now a set height, instead of resizing to match the height of the selected image on the right. I'm still not completely satisfied with this, but at least you don't see huge gaps between the rows of thumbnails.
  3. The Selected Image display now has a functional Prints button (at least for certain images) that opens a new tab with the image on Fine Art America, and the opportunity to buy various products that feature the image. Since this was the original point of the site, I'm pretty psyched that it finally works; I had spent a lot of time trying unsuccessfully to get the same functionality using the Printful API, but it was just too complicated and still didn't take care of handling the purchase for me.
Here are some things I still have to do:
  1. Make the Purchase Original button work. This should be possible through a built-in feature of Netlify that handles form submissions, but of course it's impossible to test on localhost.
  2. Make everything look nice. Currently working a Bootstrap implementation, then planning to do the same thing with Material UI, and see which one I like better.
  3. Add the Process feature, where you can see photos of the paintings at various stages of completion. The main problem with that is that Cloudinary's example code that I'm trying to copy uses a lot of Promise syntax that I still don't fully understand. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Basically done! (at least on full-screen. except for some issues.)

Image
The full-screen version of my site is essentially complete! Mostly. Except for the Map component, which I don't quite have yet; instead there's just a button that opens the location in Google Maps, in a new tab. Also, I had wanted to use URLs for all navigation, including within the Artwork page; but it turned out to involve a lot of changes, so I put that on pause for now. The mobile version is a different story. Prior to this week, opening the site on a screen less than about 600px would just break the site - totally useless navigation, overlapping elements, etc. I managed to fix that, mainly by just changing all my CSS unit values to vh/vw and %, instead of px or em. But there are still some serious aesthetic issues on mobile devices. Which I'm going to discuss in my next post. So, here is a screenshot from the site, basically as it was when my team and I presented it at GA, as a "post grad" project: And here it is now: Besides looking better, all
Read more

Getting back to it, again

Image
Got a little distracted - apparently there's something going around. OK, so, I put a lot of work into making the site mobile-friendly, which reminded me again why mobile-first is a good design strategy. But not the way I did it, so not really worth crying over now. I started this post a month ago, and then didn't publish it. So now I'm getting back to it again. My default work style is to obsess over one project until I hit an insurmountable challenge or run out of things to try, and then avoid it for a couple weeks. For whatever reason, writing this blog counts as its own project, distinct from actually developing the website. So my blog updates often happen only when the coding has reached a pause. Current Status : site is live and functional, though more could be done.   All the available controls do what they are supposed to do. However, there are some fairly obvious gaps in functionality, such as the ability to buy things directly from my site. That's on account
Read more

Mobile Issues

Image
So, a couple things don't work and/or look bad on small screens. Despite the fact that I finally stopped setting styles using pixels. Which is a remarkably bad practice, but still for some reason a tough habit for me to break. Anyway, here are some persistent bugs with the mobile version of my site: The menu , which now collapses to a toggle button below Bootstrap's medium screen size (which I believe is 768px). However, when you click the hamburger icon (aka the 3 horizontal bars that are the universal symbol for an expandable menu), the menu items are ugly, and also they push the rest of the content down the page. Should instead become a dropdown menu that floats above the page content. So, here's the homepage on my laptop screen: And here it is on mobile (Galaxy S8) - with menu expanded: The Lightbox feature . This used to handled by a complex function in App.js, which got passed as a property to every page so that any image could by magnified. Howeve
Read more