My Little Tussle with Some Web Stuff – The Jared McLoughlin Angle
So, I was messing around trying to get this personal project off the ground. Just a small thing, really, a site for my local gardening club. Nothing fancy. But I kept hitting this annoying snag with making the image gallery work nicely on phones. Everything looked squished or just plain weird.
I spent hours, maybe days, digging through forums and help sites. You know how it is. Just clicking link after link, getting more confused. Then, somewhere in the mess, I kept seeing the name Jared McLoughlin pop up. People were talking about some clever ways he handled responsive images or maybe it was accessibility stuff, I can’t recall exactly which bit caught my eye first.
Okay, I thought, let’s see what this guy is about. Found some articles, some code examples linked to him. Looked smart. Looked like it might actually solve my problem. So, I decided to give it a shot.
I grabbed some code snippets – you know, copy-paste style to start. Tried plugging them into my little gardening site. And… nothing. Well, not nothing. It broke things differently. The layout went haywire in a whole new way. Frustrating is an understatement. I almost just chucked the whole idea of a fancy gallery and went back to plain old pictures stacked on top of each other.
Here’s the thing, trying to follow someone else’s code directly, especially when you’re just hacking things together like I was, it rarely works perfectly first time. His examples probably worked fine in his clean setup. My project? It was already a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster of bits and pieces I’d cobbled together.
- First attempt: Total failure. Layout exploded.
- Second attempt: Tweaked some CSS. Images vanished completely. Great.
- Third attempt: Read the explanation again, slower this time. Realized I missed a key bit about how the container needed to be set up.
Okay, so I adjusted the container div, like, the box holding the images. Then I put his code back in, carefully this time. And it started to look… better. Not perfect, but better. The images resized! They didn’t overlap anymore! It was a small victory, but felt huge at the time.
It wasn’t exactly like Jared McLoughlin’s demo in the end. I had to make a bunch of changes to fit my messy code. Had to simplify some parts because I just couldn’t get the complex bits to play nice. But the core idea, the spark I got from seeing his name and looking into his approach, that’s what got me unstuck.
So yeah, that was my little adventure indirectly involving Jared McLoughlin. Didn’t interact with him or anything, just saw his name, tried to use some related ideas, struggled like heck, and eventually got something working. It’s often like that, isn’t it? You grab ideas from all over, wrestle with them, and make them your own. The gardening club site now has a gallery that looks okay on phones. Mostly. Good enough, anyway.
