It's easier to write (fast) than it is to capture a good photo to use as a background, at least that's been my experience. The lack of imagery shouldn't be a reason not to publishing. Although I have considering defaulting to my ever-expanding photo collection of Palm Tree's from my times in the Inland Empire and Coachella Valley on my phone.

Anyway, the goal has always been more along the lines of getting content publish daily. Given the scarcity of time as a solo dev documenting his journey, I figure the photos can be added later. There's now a need to control where the articles get displayed on the home page, because right now, their being haphazardly mapped on to the browser.

Explanation of the current state

Looking at chroniconl.com, the articles are sort-of separated between a call-to-action. There's not much magic happening on this page. Currently, the database is queried for all posts that are published. The six most recent recent posts are then presented to the user (articles.slice(0, 6)).

The second half is less exciting because not all articles have images (articles.slice(6, articles.length -1)). To account for the lack of images, (and low quality AI generated images) in some of the older posts, I added an additional parameter to the React component to display a different type of card.

Mapping through the data starting from the most recent is clearly the path of least resistance. Really just a rushed effort to ship an update to the landing page. The next step from here, is to provide the ability to organize articles on this screen via an interactive UI. Imagine an administrative user interface with the ability to drag and drop to re-order the articles and how their displayed.

As a feature, that would yield immediate benefits for me. Enabling the ability to move published articles into the second section, (aka ones that don't have a cover photo.) prevents me from holding onto articles for extended periods of time.

Onto the next steps

This is the first post of what will be a mini-series of articles documenting how Chroniconl will go from this uncontrolled approach, to giving the administrative user more control over what is displayed on the landing page.

The current priority is to get get control of how the imageless articles are displayed on the browser. To the folks who visit the blog, there would be no change in appearance. This first step could be a CLI application really, but when considering the end goal is to drag and drop to re-order, it might not make sense to spin up a new Nodejs environment just for this.

Avoiding Perfection (as a Feature)