April 19
Hi everyone! Long ArtCentral update today, been looking into a lot of things.
This week I've been studying some possible routes for creating an image gallery layout. Simple layouts are easy to do, but the problem is quite complex for a site like this; I'll explain in more detail.
If you look at say, ArtStation or Pixiv, they use simple grid layouts where images fit into a fixed size shape like a square and the image is cropped into that square, to form a preview. To do something like DeviantArt, where images are arranged in rows and almost never cropped unless it has an extreme aspect ratio, is very difficult indeed to do. I'm going to spend a bit more time investigating it and figuring out how plausible it is to implement that in a reasonable timeframe, or whether something else like a fixed-size gallery of sorts will function better. Ultimately I need to decide on the design of the user portfolio page, what display options it will have, and go from there.
Other parts of the site's layout should be comparatively simple to accomplish: that will just come down to selecting a standard font for the site, laying out div sections in simple grid patterns and so forth, and making sure the site is easy to read and navigate.
Outside of that, I've gotten Amazon S3 and CloudFront working for public content. The only remaining steps there are to implement it for private content, e.g. things that only a user who paid for a particular bundle should have a link to, and then it's a case of tidying up the code and making sure all the database updates are done etc. I'm in the middle of talking to Stripe about their adult content rules; I have no idea how that conversation will go, might not be easy to get a clear answer.
As you can see from this post's image, the project is bigger than it might seem so far. I'll have a layout to show once I'm finished cleaning up the backend code for uploading profile pics, banner images and artworks so that I can properly design and test the site layout (didn't want to hack it together just for display purposes). I am not planning to make ArtCentral's code public, at least not for the foreseeable future.
