Colin Walker

I uploaded a couple of screenshots of the old home page to Gemini and asked it for some ideas on a redesign. My prompt included the need for a mini bio and a focus on my music.

The response suggested a short bio at the top with a prominent call to action or link to Bandcamp.

Another idea was some kind of music widget with, possibly, a random track. I like the idea but would have to create a new table in the database with links to various tracks that I could randomly pull from.

Instead, I am considering a standard Bandcamp embed with the latest release. I already put embeds on /music so that's a simple cut & paste job. I might try a base embed, but have an option in the admin page for the link to the latest release. Rather than redo the home page each time I release something, I could just change the option. 🤔

One other thing Gemini proposed was to have a grid of cards for the different sections of the site: blog, music, etc. The old home page had all the links in a big 'card', so maybe I could use the same style but with each item having its own section.

I started testing a responsive CSS grid that would change the number of columns based on screen size, but haven't really worked out how I want it to look.

At least it's got me thinking and given me some ideas, which is more than I've had in weeks.

# Mucking around with a test page, I came across an issue I never realised I had on the original home page. It was something caused by my misunderstanding of how a particular PHP function worked.

It's now fixed!