After a long weekend of very active development, the site is a little bit less of a wasteland. The About and Contact pages finally contain what they say on the tin. However, the most work went into the new Photos page. It now loads photos from an SQL database and displays them in a responsive gallery. I think it looks quite good, but my favorite part is the new image viewer.
I originally planned to write a JavaScript image viewer from scratch, but quickly found myself out of my depth. In the future I may revisit the idea, but for now the site has a viewer with almost¹ all of the features I could want thanks to Chen Fengyuan's Viewer.js. Viewer.js is simple and performant, letting visitors view my photos more closely without clashing with the site's design or slowing it down. Go ahead and try it out yourself by clicking on any image in the photo gallery.
Another addition to the site is the "Latest Post" section on the homepage, which—much like the name implies—shows the latest post from my blog. The page used to be completely empty, and that didn't make a very good first impression, so I'd say it's been greatly improved. If you're thinking it still looks somewhat bare, I agree. I plan to add more sections soon.
To check out all the code for this version of the site, as well as get a bit more detail about the changes made, go to my GitBucket!
Thanks for reading.
—Joe
Notes:
1. I say "almost" because Viewer.js can't display any information about each image except for the title. I'd really like to make descriptions and EXIF data viewable directly on my site.
