

 My weekend "project" - RiderOfGiraffes
http://www.williamsonfineart.co.uk/Retrospective.html

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RiderOfGiraffes
At short notice my mother-in-law decided that she needs more space in the
house, and wants to dispose of some of her paintings. She has decided to have
a sealed-bid auction, culminating on June 25th.

She wondered if something "web-like" could be done, so I took a few hours and
knocked up this. It's not perfect, and in some ways it's not good, but she
seems thrilled by it, so "the client is happy".

Just thought some of you might like to see it. All done in hand-crafted HTML
(and almost certainly not standards compliant) and in hand-crafted Python,
with no frameworks or libraries.

Comments welcome, but be gentle. Changes are still being made as refinements
are suggested.

~~~
retube
obvious perhaps, but have you considered ebay or etsy?

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
We have, but at such short notice it was less risky to create a site to
accompany the live sealed-bid exhibition and sale, than to try to work out how
to torture eBay into doing what we want.

We're expecting most people not to be particularly comfortable with computers,
nor to have PayPal (or other) accounts, etc, so making it independent seemed
the best option. Most are comfortable with a browser, completing a form, and
email, so that's all this version requires.

PS: I'm in London(ish) June 23 to 26. Perhaps I could buy you a coffee, or
other beverage of your choice.

~~~
retube
That's very kind! Unfortunately I'm away over those dates. But if in London
again let me know.

Good luck with the auction!

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
How can I let you know? There are no contact details in your profile.

Apart from that - thanks again.

------
retube
A minor point, but your thumbnails should be thumbnails, not the full size
image rendered small. They'll load much faster, and reduce the strain on your
server.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Agreed. The scope is there in the code to change that, I'm just trying to sort
out some cross-browser compatability problems first. For example, on some
browsers the thumbnails aren't clickable, and on others the cells in the
Gallery aren't all the same size!

The other point is that once the full sized images have downloaded, the
individual page image then comes up _much_ faster, becuase the image is
already cached. I'm watching the load to decide when to make the change.

And thank you.

EDIT: Thumbnails now created, loaded and in use. And thanks again.

~~~
retube
Caching will help you on reloads - depending on browser configurations - this
cannot be relied on. It's good you now have proper thumbnails.

I took a very brief look at your HTML. I don't know why in some browsers the
image wont be clickable. Having an <img> nested in an <a> should be fine.
However I will say make sure your image tag is terminated properly: it should
end with a trailing slash: />.

Also, you have a lot of table action going on. Whilst it's fine for your
general tabular layout, there's no reason to have nested tables.

Re the sizing, without a detailed look I don't know. You are specifying td
widths. These will only be honoured so far as the browser can conform to
these. Resizing the window may break this for example. You could also try
specifying a width for each image.

Also, re styling, a little bit of css will get you a long way.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Excellent advice and information - thank you.

I've changed the hrefs in the gallery items so now they only surround the img
in the table cell, and not the entire table cell. I think you're looking at
the more recent version. I'll change the trailing ">" in the img to a "/>"
shortly - thanks.

A lot of the layout is generated programmatically - a long time ago I wrote a
tool that takes a description of a page and spits out the table formatting. It
then populates the cells with the contents of the requested file.
Specifically, when fed with this:

    
    
       AAAE
       AAAE
       CCDE
    

it will generate the table layout and put files A.phtml through E.phtml in the
places requested. Makes laying out pages like this trivial. Ish.

I think I've worked out what Opera was doing. For each image I'd asked for a
height of 120. It correctly scaled the image, but scaled the cell horizontally
for the original size, or something similar.

I now also have some css, but it's not being rendered correctly by all
browsers. However, it's pretty good on several, so I'm going to work more on
content this afternoon. Steve (my mother-in-law) has several more pictures to
add to the list.

