Improving the Gallery

Now that the gallery is up and the Dungeon 23 project is off the ground, there's some things the site needs a bit. Going to list them here as a bit of a ToDo. I'll strike things out as I get to them or update. You can expect this note to update regularly (or often, but irregularly?)

Mobile view is ... not great. This affects Dungeon23 more because of the sidebar. The main garden should be fine. We'll see as more notes stack up and see how the grid min-maxing works. I think it'll be fine, but like my erotica site, there might be a lot of things on the front page, and no text to center the user when they arrive. I suspect many people will navigate to a particular page (if anyone comes at all), but it's a concern.

Also with that is the fact that Firefox doesn't support the :has() operator, so the sidebar on the dungeon32 pages stacks vertically with the article. Ideally (and currently) all the pages are interlinked, so it might be better to drop the sidebar, make it a menu for people who don't have :has (or are on mobile). That's a thing to think about.

I'm not sure I'm happy with the typography. I'm using Open Props (https://open-props.style/) for this, and the normalize that comes with it. It's definitely changeable, along with some better handling of props. I don't need form handling, etc, so I may dig more into the css as I go. It's readable now and other than maybe some link colors should be accessible. (Need to test that as well, while doing the mobile styling fixes). (Also maybe use Roboto or another font, not sure what open props is using, it's fine for now, which is the point.)

Speaking of people using this, I'm still a huge fan of RSS, and there's none here. Ideally, I'd want something for both the main site and the dungeon 23 project. OTOH, when does something go into RSS? When the page is created or updated? RSS was kidn of made with weblog-style publishing in mind, and this is different. I suspect on page creation, although a major update might force a new rss. (Do readers handle this through links?)

Making RSS with gatsby isn't hard, and injecting it into the head shouldn't be hard (I think React Helmet is already part of this gatsby theme). Gatsby simplifies a lot of things as you only need to know the state of the data at generation time, not what might have happened to it because soem user did something on their WordPress backend. I can generate the site locally, confirm it looks like I want, then publish it. (Vercel + gitLab really making that super-easy).

Things are really different in today's landscape from when I was actively blogging before.