Photo of Andrew Hosgood

Andrew Hosgood

  • Developer
  • UI designer
  • Photographer

Projects

Smileonthetiles

Plymouth's committed and legendary premiere nightlife photography.

As of July 2020, the site hosts over 1.8 million photos across 26,000 albums.

smileonthetiles.co.uk home page

Visit Smileonthetiles (opens in new window)

What


Smileonthetiles used to be the largest known Coppermine photo gallery on the web.

The founder, a good friend, was looking to have the site rebuilt as it had become too old and slow.

I undertook the task of rebuilding the entire system from the ground up using TwistPHP including all of the front end, a complete database redesign and the admin area which handles the uploading and processing of tens of thousands of photos a month.

There is an API that handles all requests to enable future applications to piggyback off the system.

Tech


Front end
Vue + Vuex
Language
TypeScript
Design
Bespoke SCSS
Bundler
Webpack
JSON REST API
TwistPHP
API authentication
JWT
Database
mySQL
Favourites store
Firebase
Source control, CI/CD
GitLab

Extras


As part of the rebuild, I looked into PWA technologies such as service workers to help speed up the site. This was something that increased site usage greatly and was not something that Alex expected.

The database and data structure allows the content on the site to appear in order from the most to least popular.

The database structure is massively expandable and very flexible for future use in mind, something that had previously been an issue.

Screenshots


An album view on the Smileonthetiles website
The photo viewer on the Smileonthetiles website
The menu of the Smileonthetiles website