roy

It's been nearly four years since I've written in this thing! 

There's actually a bug with the homepage list; I think when I switched everybody to friends-only it caused a loop of some sort. Diving into code that's 6+ years old is hardly something i want to do, so I'm hoping by posting more sites into the main list the problem will fix itself. 

Or else I'll be logging in every day and manually killing the scripts that are hogging up CPU. 

roy

Buenos Aires, like I've come to expect from any big city, is not filled with warm people. In fact, it'd probably rank at one of the worst in the cities I've visited. An example - on multiple occasions, when somebody sneezes and I respond with a "Salud," I get a bewildered glare as a response. 

But the point isn't to rag on the Argentines - it's a big city, and I can't expect Southern hospitality to extend anywhere but the South. 

The point of this story is to highlight one moment of exceptional grace. It was something small, but I haven't been able to shake it. 

This is my last day in Bs As, so I was a bit rushed to get things done and packed for my flight later today. I stopped by the local McDonald's to grab something quick to eat for lunch. After I picked up my order, I went over to the center island to get some napkins. In front of the napkin stand was this 12-year old handicapped boy pulling napkins from the dispenser. As I walked over, he reached over to the straw machine, grasped at a straw (his motor skills weren't great - he was literally crushing the straw as he handed it over to me) and offered it to me with a smile on his face. Now, I haven't had ANY moments of strangers being kind to me this whole trip - and this just floored me. On top of that - he put down the napkins he had grabbed, pulled a napkin from the dispenser, and gave it to me as well. 

Here was this kid - a handicapped kid - exhibiting a warmth and grace that nobody else had extended on this trip so far. I was speechless for a moment, then smiled back with a "Muchas gracias - muy amable!" He flashed me a huge smile, grabbed a few more napkins, and sauntered back to his table with his mother. 

After I ate, I walked past the table on my way out. He was sitting there with his mother (who looked a bit raggedy and tired, I'll be honest) while she was carefully placing the Monopoly pieces they had gotten from their meal on the board. He looked so incredibly happy. 

All I could think about in that moment, was that this mother gave such an unconditional love to her son to the point that he exhibited that same love and grace to a clear extranjero -  warmth and hospitality that was not the norm. 

Kudos to that mother - whose life couldn't have been easy - but has shown patience and love in a way that not many other people do. 

roy

well, let's hope this works. 

i guess one of the byproducts of this whole tabulas situation is that my tabulas is back. lulz. 

So the last time I wrote, the general direction of miyaki was to implement something like this: 

Since then, I've been playing around with some layout changes and it's looking like this so far: (You can see a live demo of it here; use password "password")

I decided having all the name and icons visible at start would be too distracting from the most important aspect: the photos. So I implemented a hover state on the thumbnails; hovering over them shows the name below it:

I was struggling with the top navigation bar - the more I used the site, the more I was ignoring it - having the title of the album be in the top left didn't feel right. So this updated view reserves the equivalent of 4 photo blocks for the album. I think it helps define the feel of the album right from the start. I've also added rudimentary support for lazyloading thumbnails, but the current transitions need some work (they just drop into place rather jaggedly). 

Deleting images (if you've uploaded any) is a breeze, as is un-deleting them (or completely wiping them from the trash can). 

I've really solidified the user experience for per-image navigation; I'm trying not to use a lightbox (I hate lightboxes), but I'm having some trouble with the single-image views not feeling polished. The goal of this user flow was to minimize the time to contribute to each photo; adding and viewing comments while navigating the images is very, very easy.  

Each single image loads up very quickly via async calls (you can navigate with left/right arrows) and preloads in the background so it feels very responsive. 

Because each image takes up so much screen real estate, I've been playing around with autoscrolling (you'll see when you load each one). I'm not sure this is a good experience, although it's an optimal result. (Feels like you're taking the user out of control of the site). 

Next up: the album editing experience - that's a tricky one. Also, album creation being a smoother part of it... and of course, the most important: sharing options. I'm not completely clear yet how all those pieces will come together right now (part of the reason I moved to this new album view was to provide a better inline editing experience for the album name), but I'll have this weekend to mull over it. 

"... up on the hill, across the blue lake... that's where i had my first heartbreak... i still remember how it all changed..."

what a killer song