mybigadventures.com

I've been working a little more on restyling the image gallery. I decided the square thumbnails were looking a little dated so wanted to move towards something that looked a bit more like the tiled effect you may have seen on sites like flickr and pintrest. I had a look first of all to see if there were any pure CSS solutions but as yet there doesn't seem to be support for floating the images together so that they fit without gaps.

Old Layout

 New Layout

After a little research it seemed that JavaScript was the way forward as it can be used to calulate a suitable arrangment when all the images have loaded (if you're interested, this is the library I'm using though it looks a bit better on their site at the moment - miromannino.github.io/Justified-Gallery/). Right now that means a bit of a delay waiting for all the thumbnails to finish loading before they can be displayed. This can feel a bit slower than images displaying as soon as they have loaded, which is what currently happens when moving between albums. I'm hoping to optimise this further over the course of the next two weeks, but for now I've added a little loading animation to keep you interested whilst you wait for the pictures to load.

Let me know in the comments if you experience any particularly long delays on any of the albums. Thanks. 

I've just been tweaking the site a little more as I was experiencing a few issues with load speeds on photos. I've made a couple of changes that will hopefully speed things up. To start with I've added a new optimised image size. Essentially when you first visit one of the pages, a bit of code grabs your screen size and saves it into the session. Assuming I've captured your screensize, each time you load a full size image, nested in a blog entry or by clicking album image, the website will decide if it's worth while loading the larger image or if it can show you a reduced resolution. So it basically now means for each album image I store at least 3 copies of it, one full size, one reduced resolution (1000px max dimension) and one higher resolution (2000px max dimensions). If you're viewing album thumbnails for example, the site will serve up the thumbnail images which speeds up download for you. If you're looking at a large image in an album, that will either be the 1000px or 2000px image - depending on your screen resolution.

The image below should resize dynamically depending on your resolution. If you right click it and open image in a new tab, the majority of you should see a 1000px wide image, however, if you're running a resolution higher than 1500px wide you should get the much larger, slower to download 2000px image.

I've also tweaked the image loading on the PHP side of things, I was previously loading images into memory using imagecreatefromjpeg in PHP. It turns out that this was a bit of a hog on memory for the site and also led to a much slower load for end users. It now does a simple redirect if possible to static files, which again should improve things.

Hopefully you'll see a difference when browsing though the site. Let me know in the comments if you experience any load issues. 

As part of our planned days out this week, we had booked tickets for Windsor Castle online so after a bit of a lie in and some breakfast, we set off. Windsor actually isn't that far away, and only took 40 mins or so to drive. We managed to find a space in the long stay car park about 10 minutes walk from the castle, and paid enough to take us through to just after 5. There was a bit of a queue to get in, but after a quick check, we again found we could skip the queue having booked online. We collected our tickets and went through security and then we were in.

We picked up the free audio guides to take us around. After a consult of the map it turned out you could visit the different parts of the castle in any order, we decided to see the state rooms first. It was all very impressive with the Waterloo room a real highlight. There was also an exhibition about the recent wedding of Harry and Megan, and their outfits from the day were out to look at including the outfits of the page boys and bridesmaids.

From the staterooms, we visited St George's Chapel, it has a pretty spectacular ceiling and is where many past members of the Royal family are buried including Charles I and Henry VIII. It was starting to get dark as we left, and after a quick snack at Starbucks, we had time for a quick wander around the town before heading home. We ended the evening at Pizza Express, using our taste card to get 241 and gift cards to pay. A pretty cheap night out really. We're going to take the decorations down tomorrow and then its my birthday on Saturday!