Happy New Year! Welcome to 2026!
Now that the holidays are over, I've gotten back into editing the website. Still working on infrastructure, and the largest missing element at the moment is the Gallery page and the underlying "gallery" Django app I need to support that page.
In my previous blog post, I showed a design that included a gallery viewer that was more old fashioned than what I decided to implement. Before I got to work, I sat back to assess the design. It occurred to me that I just designed in an improvisational way in order to figure out how things work in Figma. That was cool and useful, but it was also done in a rush because I did not want my design to be finished before publishing in this case.
Endless design is a roadblock I have learned to eliminate as a habit. Instead, I needed an MVP to get something started. Minimum Viable Product in this case meant to me that I have a gallery page that looks reasonable while I address the features I have aimed at later versions. Still, I rejected my original design and committed to a better fit.
So I gave the design some more research. I looked up the approaches others use, and at first it looked like the industry standard involves using a JavaScript solution named PhotoSwipe. After digging around a bit though, I discovered that the main edge PhotoSwipe offers seems to be optimization and support for the "pinch" gesture on mobile. The main consequence people gripe about is adding video, which I will definitely be adding!
In considering alternatives, I landed on GLightbox. This decision costs me a slight hit on performance, but gains ease of implementation as well as better support for video. Apparently PhotoSwipe causes headaches there, often later when the headaches are not anticipated.
At the time of writing this blog post, I only have 4 images in my library, which means I cannot really test the gallery page with large numbers of images yet. We'll see how that goes later. In the meantime, I plan to add images one at a time, each with its own blog post, so that testing will need to wait. I am 100% confident that I can make improvements and edits as the library grows.
For now, the MVP is up, and if you notice the navbar at the top of the page, there is a new "Gallery" link which can take you there, and you will see all the images I've uploaded so far, in reverse order so that you see the most recent image first.
Certainly, I will edit the query to leave out things like screenshots. I am saving that for later, when I have added in more images.
That is all for this blog post. Today's image is a simple screenshot of the gallery showing 4 images.
Initializing the Gallery page
