20 Feb 2016

New Homepage Layout

After my homepage has been online for about 1 year now, it was finally time to give it a proper layout. The old one was not really bad, but it had some essential design flaws that were even getting on my own nerves. To me, that seemed to be a clear signal to redo it :-)

So, without further ado, let me introduce the new homepage layout to you real quick.

Better Post Overview

The new homepage layout has been designed to support featured images for posts. While the old homepage ALSO had this feature, it wasn’t there at the beginning and had to be implemented later. There also was no support for showing the dates of the posts as an overlay.

Photoswipe

Another very important JavaScript library on my homepage is PhotoSwipe. This library makes all images clickable and opens them as an overlay on the current page. The most important feature though are touch gestures. Those gestures are available to any device with a touchscreen:

  • spread to zoom
  • pinch to close gallery
  • vertical swipe to close gallery
  • horizontal swipe to switch images

This makes image galleries much more fun to view on mobile devices.

PhotoSwipe was already available on the old homepage layout. In this layout, the library is integrated much better and much more reliable than before.

Image Layout, Done By Salvattore

Using Salvattore as a layout engine, images of different sizes are now arranged in a more pleasing way. This feature is fully responsive, meaning that one always gets a nice gallery layout, no matter what kind of device you use.

Check out my post of Inktober 2015 for a demonstration of Salvattore.