Progress on improving site banners

Over the weekend I picked out and processed over a dozen more personal photos to add a little flair to the site. With the assets in place, next is developing a way to take advantage of all of the banners without having to manually assign them to each page (as was the case).

Naturally a randomly rotating banner makes the most sense here. In my initial research into a Jekyll-friendly approach, I came across Jeff McAffer’s writeup on his approach here, but I believe the approach ends up flawed. Even though it’s based on pulling time (which should change), the time ends up only factoring in at site build-time. The result is that the site has (1) all pages sitewide with the same banner that (2) won’t change unless the site is revised and regenerated.

It’s clear that Javascript is the way to go here, as demonstrated by Emilee Rader’s Jekyll site. In the interest of wrapping up work on this, I opted for an interim approach as noted in a comment buried on this StackOverflow question: using page.title.size instead of site.time will at least solve the first problem in that it will at least kinda-uniquely pick out a banner for each page, although the banners stay static.

Next up: Javascript.