So, since I had the time and the desire, I rebuilt nitemayr.com. I am very happy with how it turned out!
I had an idea in my head about how I wanted to go about building it again, I was already happy with the PHP back end and the aggregation I was doing from the various places I am leaving a nice detailed RSS trail so all Iw as really doing was rebuilding the front end.
Of course, some of the back end contained some display code (bad bad bad) so that was excised and I streamlined the RSS code and some of the Flickr stuff. This made some of the code useless, but I left it in the source just in case.
The first major challenge was the gallery. I has previously used a nice JavaScript gallery, but wasn’t happy with it’s lack of keyboard support. So I switched to the flickr flash gallery, which was great. I almost want to switch back to flickrviewr or a variant of it. So I settled on an open source FLASH gallery this is actually kind of buggy, but I will eventually get into the source and fix it all on my own. So there’s a win.
The UI is set up to resemble an old-school computer, solid-state and green-phosphors. I covered it in hand-written labels and stuck on crap. There is a spattering of paint and rust on it and I think it captured what I saw inside my head. I kept the original source materials to rebuild it.
Converting from the TABLES that I originally built it on to CSS turned out to be easier than I thought, [I should point out that the site was entirely CSS driven before, the redesign started as a tables layout]. Once it was all laid out, getting the content in was fairly easy.
The last challenge was making all of the old content available, along with what was previously available on “LIVE” which I think I have achieved. So there we are a new site built from the remains of two others and laid out like and old-school computer.
I hope you enjoy checking it out.
I’ve had some cold calls this week, wish me luck!
Originally posted on nitemayr.vox.com