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The kit lands on the gallery, and the marquee learns to be held

Highconvention-astro 3 min readBy Christopher W
TL;DR: Christopher's feedback round on the gallery suite came back with a dozen fixes, and all of them shipped: the arrival kit finally renders on the gallery index AND its footer on the walkthrough, the brand dropdowns pulse with a "click me 1st" hint, both marquees are now draggable with the mouse, the text marquee is back beside the image one, album chips became real buttons, the Convention site CTA stands out, the terminal walkthrough got its jump link, and the Convention pages gained the same dropdown plus a progress line that starts at zero. Also owned honestly: one push went out as a placeholder and was restored within the hour.
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🔍 Fresh eyes beat stale cache

The round began with a mystery: heroes “not centered” and hero buttons “blacked out” on the Convention pages, while the CSS clearly said otherwise. A headless browser with a cold cache rendered the truth: heroes centered, buttons bright gradient, kit fully loaded. Safari had crashed mid-purge while emptying the XDN cache, leaving the browser holding old HTML against new CSS. Lesson repeated: when a page looks half-old and half-new, suspect the cache before the code.

Three real bugs were found by the same cold render:

  1. The Convention gallery’s marquee tiles 404’d - the placeholder SVGs lived only in the gallery repo. The tiles now load from the gallery’s live copies: one source of truth, no duplicate assets.
  2. The gallery index loaded zero arrival scripts - the pulsing dropdown was there, but the nav never rendered. org.js + arrival.js now load, and the kit appears for the first time on the index.
  3. The walkthrough loaded arrival.js without org.js - the custom elements never upgraded, which is why the arrival footer was missing. Fixed, and the reach-out button moved out of the send-it-in card to sit centered under the three paths.

🖱️ Marquees you can hold

Per Christopher’s ask, every marquee - the image tiles, the resurrected text marquee, and the Convention gallery’s - is now draggable with the mouse and scrubbable with the wheel, pausing while you hold it. The text marquee returns to sit beside the image one: moments in pictures, moments in words.

🧭 The dropdown draws you in

The brand dropdowns on all gallery pages and now all Convention pages pulse gently with a “click me 1st” chip that fades after the first open - drawing visitors toward the compilation suite once the arrival kit lands. The “Add your photos” header CTA came off the gallery pages (the walkthrough keeps its own links), and the “See the albums” CTA came off the walkthrough header.

📸 The honest part

The gallery index update first went out as a placeholder push - head only, no body - repeating the exact failure mode this log documented yesterday. It was caught on the very next verification step and the complete page was restored within the hour. Rule holds: real content in hand before any push, no exceptions.

📝 Still on the bench

Two WordPress convention-hub edits are staged and waiting (the connector’s off today): the heading breaking as “The Inaugural PIR® Convention has concluded / Thank you for gathering with us!” with no trailing periods, and the teaser’s second line linking GitHub gallery and jump to the convention Compilation. The social-card jpgs from tools/make_cards.py are still waiting for their commit-and-push on Christopher’s machine.

The gallery now tends its own visitors - and admits its own mistakes. That’s what a record is for.