README.md

Spotted

A personal project, originally developed over the summer over 2018, for spotting cool greenery and cataloging houseplants. The website consists of watercolor illustrations hand-made by Ella that accompany descriptions of plants and guides to caring for them. You can visit the site at guinane.xyz/Spotted.

Operational Notes

This project is written using Astro and deployed by Github Pages to the compiled-site branch. The deployment process follows the same pattern as my personal site, and more information can be found in its Deployment section.

Local Development

Clone the repository, and install the dependencies:

pnpm install

To build and run the site locally:

pnpm run dev

Project Structure

├─ .github/       # workflow scripts for build & deploy
├┬ public/
│└─ images/       # images, obviously
└┬ src/
 ├─ components/   # a few simple components
 ├─ layouts/      # the template for each plant page
 └┬ pages/
  ├─ index.astro  # the homepage
  └─ *.md         # all the plant pages

Adding a New Plant

Start by creating a new Markdown file, or coping an existing one, in the src/pages/ directory. Name the file after the plant — in all lowercase — and replacing any spaces with hyphens. For example, the page for "Golden Pothos" would be named golden-pothos.md.

Fill out the following fields according to the plant you are adding:

---
name: # The Common Name of the Plant
image: # The name of the image file (without the ".png" extension)
layout: ../layouts/default.astro
last-updated: # The date in YYYY-MM-DD format

latin-name: # The Latin Name
type: # Whether its perennial or annual
native-to: # Where it is from
ideal-climate: # The biome it lives in
height-range: # The size of the plant
sun: # Sun preference
water: # Water preference
---

# Enter a little blurb here (about one paragraph).

Make sure the image of the plant has a transparent background and is named the same as you wrote it in the template above. The image: field should only have the file name (i.e. pothos) while your image should be named the same thing plus the file type (i.e. pothos.png). Only use PNG images.

Drop the image file into the public/images folder. If you are running the site locally, you will need to stop and restart the development server.

Historical

Spotted was first developed over the summer of 2018. It was the first multi-paged website I had ever built, and that came through in almost every aspect of the finished product. The site was ugly, slow to load, and very inaccessible.

As I improved over the years I became increasingly (and painfully) aware of these shortcomings. But as it turned out, the project's code was just as riddled with problems. It was disorganized, hard to run locally, and tangled up on itself. For example, all of the site's styling was shoe-horned into one big 750-lined CSS file.

In late 2021, the domain name for the original iteration of the site — spotted.site — expired, and I chose not to renew it. The site was relocated to guinane.xyz/Spotted, where it still lives today. This change broke a bunch of things on the site (of course it did), and it seemed like if I was going to fix it, I might as well fix everything.

The original site still holds a place in my heart, and you can visit it in all its glory at guinane.xyz/Archive/Spotted/2018. The source code has also been preserved on the 2018-version branch.