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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.