Long Time No Post

North Bank of the Douro River, Porto, 2017

There’s been a long gap between posts to my Journal, my last one was on Christmas day.

Life got in the way: I’ve been working on my website generator; I’ve been thinking about how photos are displayed on this website; I haven’t been out much due to the cold, freezing weather; and no visits to the pub due to taking time off drinking alcohol.

Website Generator

This website has been written with the Jekyll Website Generator. The software works well but it has too many restrictions for me. Some of the things I’d like to do with this website are difficult or impossible. So, I’m spending this year writing my own website generator (a retirement project to keep my brain active and my programming skills up to date). This way, I get one that does what I want it to do, not what someone else thinks I want. It will be open source; anyone will be able to use it.

I don’t want to bore you with posts on this website about developing it (I guess most of you will be turned off by computer programming). I’m writing about it here.

Photos

When I started this website, I wanted to have a daily photo feature, it didn’t last long as it became difficult to get a suitable photo every day. I decided to have a journal instead; it’s working well. I’ve decided to add a photo feature, where I will publish some of my best photos, one photo per page. I’m working on this now.

I’ve designed this website to have a maximum width of 1,000 pixels, which means the photos also have a maximum width of 1,000 pixels, no matter what the screen size. On a larger screen I’d like to have bigger photos. But a width of (say) 2,000 pixels just doesn’t work, mainly because the text will be too wide. I tried to write about why in this post, but I haven’t got the time now (I’ll return to this issue sometime in the future). You need to trust me, a web page size greater than 1,000 pixels for this website just doesn’t work.

I’m working on a feature, where a photo can be double clicked to display it in an easily resizable popup. This means that on a large screen, photos can be displayed in the popup can have a width that is greater than 1,000 pixels. There is a problem here, I need to learn the Typescript programming language, so it might take some time.