Illustration portfolio site - House of Deadleg

[houseofdeadleg]

I've recently updated my website at www.houseofdeadleg.co.uk to run on Processwire. This is the first site I've made in it – although I have one other that's in progress (which unfortunately may never be used) – and compared to the process of making a site in something like Wordpress it was far simpler and quicker, and is much cleaner, easier and streamlined for updating, etc.

It's a fairly simple site made with Twitter Bootstrap, Masonry.js and making use of the Dribbble API, with the aim of letting the images do the talking.

[MatthewSchenker]

Greetings,

I just checked this out -- using iPad Safari and Chrome. Looks fun, and you certainly "let the images do the talking"!

Everything works great and your creations are interesting. I like your twisted sense of humor. You seem to tend towards the macabre, but that does make your work memorable. Your logo is humorously disgusting!!!

My only comment is that the menu pull-down button seems odd. The button itself seems out of place. What's interesting is that your site is very transition-heavy, which is great. But with the menu I think it would actually be more elegant to just display steady links.

Thanks for sharing!

Matthew

[owzim]

Congrats on you first PW site. A great and interesting set of illustrations you have there. I have to admit though that I don't like the genericness of bootstrap that shimmers through the site, especially the tab buttons, but that might just be me. Perhaps style them appropriately to you awesome illustrator style and therefore make them more individual and less generic?

Cheers.

[houseofdeadleg]

Hi Matthew, thank you for the kind comments

I was thinking about doing something with the menu button t'other night, and possibly a few other bits I might change when I get chance, I'll have a look into using steady links instead when I have a play with it. 

@owzim 

Yeah, the buttons are on the list for an update too:)

[houseofdeadleg]

I've just made a few minor updates to the site (next/previous page arrows on image pages, removed the currently viewed item from the Masonry grid, updated to latest version of Processwire) which have all been uber easy to implement. I also made one more change that works perfectly on my local machine, but when uploaded to the server it's suddeny stopped working.

One of the items on the site is an animated gif, but when the thumbnail image that appears in the masonry grid is created it breaks the gif and shows only the first frame (in this case a rectangle of plain green). What I'd like is for the animation to show in the grid. My first thought was to detect if the page image was a gif, and then display the original file in the grid if this was the case, instead of creating a thumbnail. There are a number of drawback to this aproach, but I couldn't get it to work anyway so...

Instead I decided to create an extra field for a preview image. If the image is an animated gif I create the full size image, then a smaller version to use as the preview. If a preview image exists this is used instead of generating a thumbnail. This works perfectly on my local setup, however on the live site it isn't returning the correct path to the image.

Any ideas why this might be?

[ryan]

Hard to tell without seeing the code -- can you post the non-working code here?

[houseofdeadleg]

Eureka! Fixed it. When I created the preview field on the live site I forgot to set it to contain a single file rather than an array.

[houseofdeadleg]

I've just recently made a few updates to my site, the main one of which is the addition of a blog/sketchbook area – http://www.houseofdeadleg.co.uk/blotter/ – that makes use of the comments fieldtype (thanks to all the forum posts on the subject).