I couldn’t sleep last night. I’m not manic, I’m just going through this months-long bout of insomnia. At least I don’t think I’m manic. It doesn’t have any of the characteristics of my usual mania. And up until last night I wasn’t even getting out of bed when I couldn’t sleep. But last night I did, and I made you a website.
Introducing Dimspire.me. It’s built on Jekyll and has a bunch of automations. I can essentially create a “dimspiration” using an Affinity Photo template, and then RetroBatch will output wallpaper sizes (including iPhone) and square versions for posting and populating the gallery. Just running rake will find new photos added to the assets folder and generate posts for them, which will then populate the index pages. It should be pretty simple to maintain. All documented in a Howzit notes file, of course.
The site is pretty simple: a homepage with description and the latest few posts, a “Dimspirations” page that’s essentially a blog post index but done in gallery fashion, and a random dimspiration page that will just throw single random dimspirations at you. Fun stuff.
When viewing a single Dimspiration (by clicking on any thumbnail), you get some cool UI showing edges of the previous and next Dimspiration. I like it, anyway. There’s still some work to do on certain breakpoints, but overall the styling should work on any device. And every Dimspiration page has a download button, where you can download all available versions of the current Dimspiration. This is accomplished by a Rake task that parses every post, extracts the YAML key that defines the image for the page, then zips up every file in the assets directory that matches it. It creates a manifest table that shows what’s in the zip file, with each individual file linked. So when there are wallpaper versions of a Dimspiration, you can download the set or follow a link to a specific version. Took a little thinking and tweaking, but I think it’s a good solution.
I hope you enjoy it. It’s cathartic for me to create these, and they’re getting better with time. I’m not going to try to monetize any of this at this point, but I’ve watermarked all the images so if you share them, they should trace back to me. Speaking of, I do still need to consider adding share buttons to these… but it always freaks me out how much data social sites collect when you include their button, so I’ll need to figure out ways around that. We’ll call that “next step.”
Love always,
Brett
