The Gallery - Version Six

Brief summary for you if you don’t wanna waste time reading all this stuff. The Gallery is my personal web gallery. Currently in it’s 4th year of existence, runs on top of the awesome Kirby CMS. Font is Iowan Old Style provided by fonts.com. Hosted on Digital Ocean, domain provided by Hover.

Version 6

This is the 6th iteration of my gallery which started back I think in 2013. For some reason I wanted to build a gallery of websites, because, as you know, no one has coded one before... I think I still have some of the early designs somewhere. Anyway, the idea was to code a super duper fancy website, where all the posts would have been tagged properly and everything was organized neatly. That didn’t turn out well did it.

The Gallery is the simplest gallery I can think of, even though there are some fancy things here and there. It’s a grid. You scroll and scroll and scroll (shout out to Dave Metafizzy DeSandro for the Infinite Scroll) and when you click on a thumb, the site opens up. And that’s it. There’s no categories menu, no single page you need to go through, no popups, no newsletters. If you’re browsing a site like this you’re probably a designer and you’re probably looking for inspirations. That’s what you get.

Search

Full page search is back and with that the search button is also back. Search has always been part of the gallery but on the previous 2 versions of the site the only way to activate it was to simply start typing on the keyboard. The search backend is nothing fancy and still quite buggy. I need to make some improvements but does its job decently. The live suggestions are powered by Awesomplete (thanks Lea) and the script uses a JSON generated by a simple API integrated into the site.

Single pages are still there mainly because I need something to share on Twitter and to make search engines happy. These pages are not really that important for The Gallery. I want people to browse the archive and go look at the awesome websites live and not spend time looking at pictures of them.

The site is also completely un-optimized for stats. I don’t care about page views or bounce rate and all that stuff. I want you to find good websites. That’s the goal. With V6 I finally convinced myself to add a way for people to support the site financially. If you want to help me cover hosting expenses you can throw a dollar or two. That’s always appreciated. Submissions are still obviously free, site is ads free.

The End

And this is Gallery V6. Go have a look at the live site. Link is thegallery.io and let me know if you have suggestions or find any bug.