five years on / or this...
This was the first or this...
drawing. It was made on December 31, 2014.
This is a drawing from a few days ago and this is a drawing from late 2017, somewhere in the middle of it all.
I don't have a lot to say about the drawings themselves. I make them. I usually publish them somewhere. I do it again. Five years later there are almost a thousand of them. During that time there have been a few attempts at creating at online home for all those drawings. They've been okay but nothing special. So I made a new version.
Some of the things I like about this newer version are:
- Lots of whitespace and triptych-style list views.
- Every drawing has multiple sizes to account for different sized screens. Every drawing has a
zoomable
tiled version so you can poke around the details. - Fullscreen mode for viewing zoomable images.
- There is code to resize images dynamically and always keep them fully in view above the fold.
- Keyboard (and touch) shortcuts for navigation.
- Tags and year/month/day style archives.
- It works well on phones, tablets, laptops and external monitors.
- The raw and final versions are just static files. During the intermediary stages there's a database but that database is not the source of truth and can be regenerated at any time. Maybe later versions of the site will employ fancy server-side tricks but that will be a layer on top of the baseline which is a static website that can be hosted anywhere.
- The basics still work even if JavaScript is disabled. Some of the fancy stuff like keeping an image visible above the fold or keyboard navigation won't work but basic image scaling by screen size and navigation elements are unaffected by the absence of JavaScript.
There aren't any sort of RSS or syndication feeds yet and I am still deciding whether there will be. The orthis site is meant to be more an archive than a publication or a daily feed. It's meant to be a patient place to find or reference an image in a future measured in weeks or months or years rather than something to be consumed in the moment.
That doesn't need to preclude things like syndication feeds but I am no less prey than the next person to the desire for immediate response and gratification, and the bad habits that desire fosters, when sharing something online. The decision not to broadcast updates yet, or even to commit to any kind of a schedule for updates, is an attempt to take a deliberate step back from that behavioural orbit because it seems to do more harm than good these days.
Many of the earlier drawings are small because of how they were originally published. Some of the drawings, both old and new, are poor quality because of things like lighting, a dirty camera lens or me just not making the effort.
When I can I will rescan them. A few of the originals are gone, sent to friends in the mail or because the inks have faded beyond recognition. So it goes.
You can see all the work to date here:
This blog post is full of links.
#orthis