I’ve spent the day working on cleaning up a few things. When I started this project I didn’t know what could succeed, and I tried a few different ways of doing things. Time has shown me better ways, so I’ve gone back and revised a lot of things.
I’ve extracted two JavaScript libraries – one for the various data structures that I send around between the server and the client, and one for common user interface components (in particular, the charts). Extracting the charts out should make it easy to stick them into other views. I also need to extract the documentation component, and push some more stuff into the table component so that they can be reused as well. The tabbed view in the documentation has me a bit confused at the moment. I don’t really understand the template stuff they’re using, so I can’t fiddle with it.
I also updated the navigation bar to be more garish, and kinda like how it has turned out. It’s starting to give the site that look of game pieces all over the table that I’m going for.
I’ve also been working on a page that represents a geek. The more I think about the old site with the geek page with a variety of tables and diagrams on it, the more I think that’s not suitable for this site. On that site you scroll through a lot of stuff, I want this one to be more about poking around and discovering things.
The way I see it at the moment, there will be a relatively small number of different pages, but each of them will be quite complex. I need to sit down with the old site and plan out what those pages will be. Then from the geek page shown below, there will be a number of coloured squares that link to those pages. The squares will contain a little bit of data of their own, but I was too tired today to put it in there so they’re mostly blank at the moment.
You might also notice the login button hanging in there causing trouble still. Between the CDN caching stuff, Auth0 demanding https, and insolent damn thing not want to go to the right-hand side of the page, it’s wearing me down. However at least now it’s a nice colour. Work will continue on that.
But anyway, this thought process led to the conclusion that the user collection page, e.g. http://test.drfriendless.com/collection.html?geek=Gecko3D, which is not very useful, is not very useful because I’m not clear where it’s going. And that’s practically the last step before it going somewhere.
In my method of work, ideas come together when I make a Big Diagram. I even have a big drawing book for such events. I think I’ve arrived at a point where I know what the next Big Diagram has to have in it. No really, this is a great thing!
