a quick update: wordpress, plugins, css

  • The Whisker Shop has grown a bit… and then I realized the Responsive Lightbox plugin I’m using for the catalogue has stripped all my alt-text from the thumbnails. I think of “responsive” as more than just screen size: it’s about how the screens are being used. So that was disappointing.
  • So I’m working on getting my favorite Lightbox, from Lokesh Dhakar running manually. It’s been tricky, but a test page is semi-functional, although it needs work. (The images don’t cycle through, even when tied to a common gallery name.)
  • CanITowThis.com got a mini-makeover to simplify some text styling and to get fancy with a wide-screen view, where the definitions are side-by-side to the form. Thank you to everyone for the feedback about not seeing the definitions when they’re so far down on the page below the form.

#100daysofcode

It’s been a bit of a rough month. I’ve been tinkering with this Mastodon moderation bot— and as a bonus, it’s in Python, which I love and want to do more. I’m currently working locally, but when I have something nice to contribute I’ll be setting up a gitlab account.

My family recently had to say goodbye to the greatest cat I could’ve hoped for, my kitty BFF for the last 15 years. She was always so sweet when she’d sit with me while I was working: she was always careful NOT to step on the keyboard, and I’ve never known another cat who does that. She also always remembered which parts of me hurt too much to stand or lay on, and would be near me without hurting me. She was such an angel. I’ll miss you, Ginger.
An orange cat laying on a pillow, her face and front paw sticking out from under a blanket.

#100DaysofCode – PHP edition

I switched The Whisker Shop over to use some PHP. Originally (and part of my WD4E capstone), it was HTML, CSS, and a little JS, but I wanted to keep the JS to a minimum, so it still involved a lot of repetition, copying and pasting the same code between pages, which was just annoying and antiquated.

So I put down some PHP, created a whole separate header file for the nav bar, and updated everything. I also removed the JS Lightbox from the gallery, because a Lightbox for 6 pictures felt a little silly. The site loads a lot faster now, too, although I still plan on making the photos load faster in the future, and finding a more attractive way to display that gallery page. Front-end isn’t my forte but enough people have done so many beautiful things before me, that I’m confident I can make this even prettier.

In the shorter term, I plan on updating the nav bar with a pure-CSS drop-down menu.

#100DaysofCode – link scraping script (python)

I found this great Pythonic HTML parser today and wrote a quick script for snagging the links off a page.


linkpull.py

# !/usr/bin/python

# takes URL as input, outputs all links to a file
# requires the excellent pythonic HTML parser, requests_hmtl
# parser source: https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests-html

from requests_html import HTMLSession
import os, sys

def maketextfile(linklist, filename):
    with open(filename, 'a+') as file:
        for link in linklist:
            file.write(link + '\n')

def main():
    print("\nThis is a tiny link scraper!\n")
    
    # destination file for your links:
    filename = 'linklist.txt'
    
    # get URL source:
    url = input("Enter a complete URL: ")
    
    session = HTMLSession()
    r = session.get(url)
    linklist = [link for link in r.html.absolute_links]
    maketextfile(linklist, filename)
    print("\nFinished! Your file {} is located at \n {}\n".format(filename, os.getcwd()))

main()

(part of my tiny scripts repository on github.)

#100DaysofCode – a file renaming script (python)

I can’t stand doing the same task more than 10 times in a row if there’s a way to automate it. My recent website projects have involved a lot of compressing and renaming image files, and the process is tedious. I fixed it:


renameme.py

# !/usr/bin/python

''' takes source and destination strings as input, and changes names of files in the local directory. '''

import os, sys

def fileRename(src, dest):
    for filename in os.listdir("."):
        if src in filename:
            newname = filename.replace(src, dest)
            os.rename(filename, newname)
    return

def main():
    src = input("What is the substring you need to change? ")
    dest = input("What would you like to replace it with? ")
    fileRename(src, dest)

main()

# ls
print("Process complete! New directory contents:\n{}".format(os.listdir(os.getcwd())))

(part of my tiny scripts repository on github.)

#100DaysofCode

I’ve been sussing out the details for a photo gallery… Mostly playing with CSS and Lightbox so far. I came upon a treasure trove of photos taken by a friend who passed away a year ago, and I’d like to share them with the world.

There is the main page with a basic/sample Lightbox… There will be many more photos in a gallery page and more Lightbox tweaking in the future: Eternity’s Sunrise.

Some web dev thoughts: I don’t feel like I have an eye for design, but I really enjoy tangible end results. This is why I like the idea of working on a team– I can contribute in ways that don’t involve beautification (but accessibility-improvements! those I can do!) while the real artists make things pretty. 🙂

Still, though. I think Jerry would’ve liked this gallery. He always liked simple, accessible sites.