Catio - Thinking in Components
As it was snowing this morning, I was staring out the window at the Catio. As a computer programmer, I often think in terms of "How can I build a reusable component?" As I looked at the walls of the catio, each one an independent 32" (or 36", I can't remember) section that tie together, it caused me to realize I take that component thinking even into my woodworking projects. :-)
In October 2023, I built a catio (cat patio) to give our indoor cats a safe way to enjoy the outdoors. It was a fun project that took a few weeks to complete, and the cats absolutely love it!
I thought the hover text was funny on this picture.
The Build
Here are photos documenting the entire build process and the finished catio:
Prompts Conversation (with Claude)
This blog post was created with the following prompts:
ok, time to work your magic. I would like to add a new blog post (or I would like you to add) for my catio project I did a few years ago. You can put a placeholder in for the description for now, and pick any random picture from the images/catio folder to use as the preview image. The actual post should include a thumbnail of each of the images in the catio folder. For now, lets try a thumbnail size of 300px and see how they look. I can provide more instructions if you like, but is that enough to get you started?
> Also, I think I want to start something new with each future blog post. I would like you to add a section at the botom of the post, maybe called "Prompts", and include this prompt in that section.
Why are you trying to create a 2023/10 folder? This post should be in the 2026/02 folder I think.
Ouch! Shouldn't we define a style somewhere for the thumbnails and just use that class on each of the img tags vs putting the width on every singlle img tag?
Nice start. Can we add a link to the top of the post so that I could quickly "jump" to the prompts section at the bottom?
error : {pasted terminal error output}
I like that. Now, once we are in the Prompts section, we need another "jump to top" link down there to go back to the top of the post.
Nice, thanks. Now I have a bigger question which may require changes that would affect the entire site, but I am ok with that if we can do it. I am posting a screenshot with a few notes in it. I am hoping we can reduce some of the whitespace driving the width of the page, so that we would be able to fit three thumbnails across the page. I want you to keep the responsive look you already have if I make the window smaller (that is working). But, when it is about this width, I would like to see three thumbnails across.
OutFreakingStanding! I really like that much better, thanks!
Now, for my next request, and you may have already done this, but are the images displayed in order starting from oldest to latest?
Does the Eleventy build process "optimize" the images in the public folder for the web? I am wondring if people viewing the site on mobile are going to be waiting forever for the full image to download.
Yes, please work your magic to optimize my images.
There were additional prompts after this, but you get the idea. I believe I am impressed everyday with what AI allows me to do. :-)
I thought I was done, but then I started prompting again in a new Chat to enhance the gallery further:
I am super impressed with what you have done here. I could easily leave it this way and be happy. However, since you are AI and you are great at these kinds of tasks, I am wondering if you can analyze each picture and provide a short caption under each photo that describes it. If you have longer text to describe a photo, you could add that to the text that displays if I hover over a thumbnail.
Also, can you make each thumbmail a link that opens the full image in a new tab if the user clicks the thumbnail.
Looking good, but our first challenge is I think you lost our styling that was giving us 3 images across (on larger screens). Can you find that and add it back in?