Show HN: I hand-coded a white-cube-style portfolio website

2 points

10 months ago

The last Show HN I did got me a wide amount of attention for that project, and I'm incredibly grateful to everyone here who upvoted and commented. I realize, of course, that it's also the luck of the draw. I did my best to fix some of the issues pointed out in the comments. There are still a few more things I need to fix, which I'll get to soon!

In any case, I figured I might as well share another project I've worked on. This isn't as complex as LisaGUI, and it's perhaps not as Show HN-friendly in that there's not really much to tinker with, but it was hand-crafted with great care, and it's technically interactive.

This is a gallery website I created for my grandmom's artwork. I coded everything by hand from scratch. Like LisaGUI, the website's front-end is a single page with no frameworks. You will need JS enabled; there's a bit of code that retrieves images and string data about each painting.

On the back-end, I wrote a utility to modify the gallery database (which is just a JSON file and some directories holding images). The utility consists of a python3 script that runs a locally hosted server. This launches the default browser and opens up a GUI that lets you rearrange and edit the image file and strings for each entry in the database. I created a short video demo which showcases this; it can be watched here: https://yaros.ae/data/misc/loriegalleryeditordemo.mp4

This was made during the height of the pandemic. My grandmom was depressed about not being able to go out as much as she was used to. In the past I had discussed the idea of making a website for her, and at that moment it seemed like the perfect thing I could do to help cheer her up.

Why code this from scratch? First, at the time I couldn't find a website builder offering the exact kind of template I was looking for. I wanted something that had the look and feel of a white-cube art gallery with placards on the wall next to each painting. Second, sites offered by site builders tend to be quite bloated. I wanted the leanest, simplest site possible for my grandmom's work. Third? Well of course, to see if I could do it.

I also have a clone of this site hosting my own artwork (https://art.yaros.ae/). I originally planned on making this extensible and more user-friendly so anyone could use it as their portfolio, but I never got around to it. (Consequently, right now this isn't licensed for anyone else to use.) But at this point, for most people it would probably be easier and take far less time to just set up something on Squarespace or Wix or some other site builder. The average artist probably doesn't want to have to go through the hassle of manually hosting their own site anyway (or doing something silly like updating it through commits via GitHub!).