azyrite's rail blog

Some quick touch ups before I sign off for the night; pagination has been improved for mobile users with a much larger touch target, and the article display is now easier to read on desktop with bigger text and a centred layout.

Uploaded the photos from today's trip out, complete with titles & descriptions

On the web development side, added some CSS that fixes image scaling particularly with super tall images (like portraits)

Fixed a bug where NaN values in the EXIF data would completely break the application, so that's good I guess.

Also added some more photos from the march and two photos of the Armidale/Moree Xplorer service passing Wondabyne

Added more photos from a rally and fixed up pagination links not working on Firefox mobile (those links that take you to the 2nd, 3rd, etc. pages at the bottom)

Minor improvements to the look and feel around the site, for example making titles consistently sized and adding the View all photos button to the gallery page as well.

Big user interface overhaul. Firstly, the photo grid has been turned into a masonry layout to better suit vertical photos and code refactored + extracted to a separate component. Secondly, the display page has also been greatly reworked to look more modern (inspiration taken from National Art Gallery of Australia and the NSW Art Gallery websites). Also, the font has been changed from the default sans-serif to a more interesting DM Sans.

Added a big go to gallery button on the front page, and expanded padding and generally spaced out the images a bit more for easier mobile usage and for better looks

Did some adjustments to the layout of the header, added more photos as always and improved some tags.

Added a paginated list of all photos across regardless of tag to enable users to scroll through the whole gallery.

Added the first real post/article, adding the ability to link a header photo, and displaying the author and published date of each post.

Also improved the navbar especially on touch devices with bigger and more well-defined gaps between touch targets.

Added Open Graph protocol support so now gallery pages can be richly embedded into social media sites like Twitter or Discord

Also some minor performance improvements related to fetch priority, etc.

Added EXIF parsing now using a hacky little method involving fs reading the images bytes directly and some path wizardry. I hope this works on GitHub actions lol.

Anyways, this saves from having to specify the date on the sidecar YAML for each image going forward, but if provided will override the EXIF included date.

Improved the Gallery page, with tags themselves now also being grouped into helpful boxes, along with sorting them in alphabetical order within these boxes.

As usual, more photos have been added.

Successfully deployed to GitHub pages with a custom domain! The hosting provide may change once we exceed their recommended 1GB limit though.

We're almost ready for the first public deploy, likely on GitHub pages. To that order, I have added more photos, more tags and now sorted the tags by the amount of photos they have (descending order).

The home page actually has something on it now.

Also added a couple more photos. The most time consuming part of this whole process is filling in image details and giving them a detailed, accessible description.

Finished up pagination after adding a few more photos to see it in action — users can now go between pages by clicking the links at the bottom.

Added and described more photos. I aim to provide a detailed alt-text/description for each photo to help the visually impaired and just for documentation reasons.

After much messing about and reading the docs, it finally builds! There were a couple issues with dynamically importing images but they have been resolved (the import must be a Promise for some reason and must occur in an Astro file)

Gallery, tags and photo display all working now!

Started work on the website. Only the navigation, collections and basic layout is done at the moment, along with a simple About page. I am aiming for a very simple and static website that looks decent on most platforms (phones, tablets, laptops & pcs).