It's been a crazy week or so since I published this new site, and wanted to give a few quick updates. The "Art" section is now up and live. I'm probably going to make some additional tweaks and add some pagination to it, but for something to launch, I'm pretty happy with it. It's tied to my new Instagram account purely for my creative art endeavours. If you want to follow me - you can do so here: @STLCajunArt. If you want to see everything on the new Art Gallery page instead, you can find that here: Artistic Endeavours. To bring in the items from Instagram, I'm simply calling for an API/JSON version of my IG feed, and then letting VueJs render that out to the page. Hoping to add captions, pagination, and a few other things in the near future.
I was also hoping to add comments to the posts, web portfolio, and gallery images, but I'm not seeing a good cheap option for hosted comments. Disqus used to be my provider of choice, but they don't seem to have a decent "free" plan available anymore. If anyone has any ideas, or a service that they think I should look into, let me know.
I'm also still looking into serverless components to be used for the contact form as well as a few other places in the website. I haven't had a lot of time to work on those pieces yet, but I hope to get them wrapped up soon.
In the meantime, I've been digging around in my project warehouse, trying to find something old or new to work on and keep myself learning and moving ahead. Over the last week, I picked up my old Valet Quoting system I developed a few years back. I originally wanted to build the entire thing API based with a VueJS or React front end. I got way bogged down with learning and building, while still trying to meet some type of deadline, that I ended up doing the entire project in Node/Express with a Handlebars based front-end. Right now, I'm in the process of doing a version 2 of the project, but since it is unsolicited work, I'm not sure if I want to actual push it to production or not. The utltimate plan is to fix the items that I feel were not right about the original, giving the interfaces a reactive SPA version using VueJS and possibly SocketIO to push some updates to the front end when things are updated in the backend. The backend will still be Node/Express, but will be entirely Restful APIs with no pre-rendered content. Overall, it should be a fun and interesting project to revisit, and once completed, I hope to set up a demo/staging version for all of you to check out.
Otherwise, I've been trying to get back into drawing and doodling again. My creative side has really taken a backseat to everything else I've got going on, and my imagination has paid badly for it. It's one of my main strives for getting the art page and new Instagram up and running again. I was never a great artist, but I'm hoping to at least get myself back to "good" at some point in the future, and that will only happen with practice and time.
So, that's really it for the updates. I'll try to post again in a week with anything new going on. In the meantime - keep on building and creating!