I just finished more work on the old Atomicat Photo Gallery.
I was working for him last year, basically, at the same time as I was take what was essentially my first every-twenty-years-vacation. I figured I’ve been going to school since I was four or five, and I’ll probably be working until retirement, so I might as well take a year off to do some other stuff.
The site was the first website I’ve ever designed, and went through a couple drastic redesigns. I created the modern logo, which I’d say is fairly decent, and experimented with things like floats and whatever else.
The CSS on that site is disgusting. I didn’t really ‘get’ the id attribute, and so I had classes in every little thing. Extensibility was fairly unneeded, so I would end up creating a little class to do one thing, and then paste that on whichever element needed to do that. The result was something like HTML with half the semantics of HTML. Is <div class=”floatl”> any better than <div style=”float:left”>? It seems I’d completely ruined the core idea behind CSS.
The gallery was something else: Hours upon hours of hand-crafted goodness, as from a seamstress who turns away the sewing machine to make each careful stitch with her own sure hand.
In short, it was a mess. There were eight pages to be taken care of, each with images that had to be named specifically for that page. Any images you wanted to add had to be specially named for yet another page. Each item had to have the name/description engraved in the html, to be passed in an ugly GET variable.
Tonight, I went through the motions of creating the database and putting everything in it. I took every bit of repetition in the gallery and put it in loops. The gallery went from seven pages to one; the page went from eight individual items to two (I could probably turn that to one); and that item or two is loaded in from SQL.
I guess I’ve still got to do tags, but I’m finished for tonight. I’ll have to eventually upgrade the entire site up to my current standards, and then upgrade it again to the standards I’ll have by the time I’m finished.
This is shaping up to be quite a year.
I’m pretty impressed with what I’ve seen here. Photography is a passion of mine, and I love poking around other people’s sites to check their pictures and read up on tecnhiques, etc. Keep up the good work.