Wainuiomata.com

Posts tagged by website

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Reversing temporary mobile fix

Posted on January 23, 2024 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Announcements, Developments
Tags: wainuiomata, website, gallery, theme, zoom, mobile

The other week I added a tiny improvement to the current website theme to make it a little more bearable on mobile. This was to set the default zoom level to 1.0, unfortunately it also has had some side-effects with the gallery which means I will be forced to roll it back soon.

It has made viewing photos in the gallery weird on mobile only, unless you zoom out fully first before clicking on the image. However people won't know that and will likely just see the site as "broken" instead, which is no good.

At first I was thinking "what if we just turn off zoom default of 1.0 for the gallery", the problem with that is it will lead to an inconsistent user experience with some pages looking zoomed in and others not. The other problem with it is that blog pages are also affected by this, not just the gallery.

So the best solution is to roll that bit back I think. Rushing the new design through faster isn't going to happen in these heat levels, it's been hard to function at all.

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Early articles on wainuiomata.com development

Posted on January 16, 2024 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Announcements, Developments
Tags: wainuiomata, development, website, history

A few weeks ago, Shane showed me a page with early content I wrote for the wainuiomata.com website (then ynui.co.nz) before we recorded our first ever blog post in 2005.

It is all about the early development of the site, and I was thinking while it is on the Internet Archive still, I want to grab it again and turn it into articles, setting the actual date correctly so it shows as the earliest posts.

Right now, our earliest post is Respect 2005 Hiphop Festival from February 16 2005. I remember the event well, and I remember only having a limited amount of photos because the camera battery ran flat and we didn't come prepared with a backup. Remember this was before smartphones, so you couldn't just use your smartphone to take photos so we carried a digital camera around.

So I'll see what I can do to fish some of the early content from the Internet Archive and re-add it to the blog. This was before we even had a blog.

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Starting frontend rebuild

Posted on December 18, 2023 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Announcements, Developments
Tags: wainuiomata, website, react, design, theme, vite

I went for a brief visit to the Wainuiomata Historical Museum yesterday, it was a short but informative visit. We updated the link to their website as we didn't have the correct one set so we fixed that. I also learned of similar sites and added them to the Links section and sent out a hello.

When adding historical material to the site that isn't our own content we will always source it, and make sure that it is accurate which is important to them. We try to do this anyway, but from our short meeting I got the picture that this was important.

I also started building the frontend so I'm quite excited, first day of development towards the new interface rebuild. I started setting up a NodeJS React build pipeline and fit that into the existing Wagtail site structure with Docker containers.

We are using NodeJS, React, Vite and Typescript. Things can always change rapidly in web development, particularly frontend. But that is the stack at the moment. Hot module reload (HMR) is working beautifully which allows for instant feedback which is awesome. Make a change to a Javascript, Typescript or CSS file and it instantly refreshes but without reloading the page. This brings frontend development to modern times finally, but we have to fit it in with the existing backend rendered pages so this isn't a single page app.

I am still thinking if I should roll some of this out incrementally, like React in the current site first.

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GeoDjango and PostGIS support for locations

Posted on November 27, 2023 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Announcements, Developments
Tags: wainuiomata, website, postgis, gis, geodjango, wagtail, geospatial

This weekends Wainuiomata website development included adding support for GeoDjango and installing PostGIS on the servers so that we can enter coordinates for each location. We've just rolled it out, although it won't be showing yet as we have lots of locations to enter now.

Location Page with Map

We still want to look at using OpenStreetMap on the main site as it shows we are all about open source. But for the time being it's still using Google Maps in the admin because of the location lookups.

It would be nice to use NZ Post APIs if possible for location lookup to coordinates, if it can do that. But things like that will take time to develop, right now the library we're using already supports Google Maps for location lookups (or MapBox).

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Directory ... continued

Posted on November 21, 2023 by: Rob van der Linde
Filed under: Announcements, Developments
Tags: wainuiomata, directory, clubs, website, locations, schools

We've expanded the idea of the business and clubs directory a lot by adding public places, locations and landmarks, as well as schools. It's going to take a while to fill this in with original information and photos especially since this is being done by volunteers in their spare time, however I think the end result is going to be really awesome and help show Wainuiomata to the world.

The website has almost hit 800 pages (790 to be exact) and this number is going to grow if we add every location, school, club so we've started to experiment with adding more people to the website with the "editor" role and setting up review workflows.

Editors are able to upload photos and make edits to pages, even preview them but not able to publish for everyone else to see until approved by a moderator or an admin. Having people with the moderator role as is a new thing, so this is something that will need to be earned over time.

We have mostly been adding empty pages for now with just the place name, and sometimes a link to the Facebook page and website if we can find any. But a lot more is going to need to be done, this is just to scope the thing out for now. Every single place is going need photos taken for example and they can't be copied from other websites, we have to have unique content.

We're thinking of integrating with OpenStreetMap, as we are thinking of showing a map on most one of these pages, so Google probably won't allow us to keep using the free tier anymore (we only have a single map page right now).

And finally, everything is indexed as well, so all these new locations we've been entering area already discoverable through search, even though there isn't currently a way to navigate to them (yet).

https://wainuiomata.com/search/?query=park
https://wainuiomata.com/search/?query=track
https://wainuiomata.com/search/?query=hill
https://wainuiomata.com/search/?query=bridge

You will find places like https://wainuiomata.com/places/pukeatua-bridge/ and https://wainuiomata.com/places/wainuiomata-lookout/ and there is a lot more to go yet.

We're also looking at using open data troves like https://www.gw.govt.nz/your-council/open-data/

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