I was given feedback on my website that it would be very helpful to add some pagination.
I've been hesitant because I didn't think I'd have enough content to warrant it...but then when I looked at how many posts I've written—~810 /links alone—I need it.
And I've started noticing performance issues when loading, myself.
So! That's what I've done.
Development
I used Kirby's Cookbook Recipe on Pagination to create my project navigation for my /work showcase.
It worked great, and I was able to get up and running quite quickly—and figuring out how to make it loop!
But...when coming to /links, it was a bit more complicated.
While I'm very much a Luddite and bullish on generative LLM's, I do find that they're very helpful for helping me talk to computers.
Specifically around small tools and specific problems that use logic & loops in ways my brain has a hard time keeping track of. I've also learned how to read rather than write it from scratch—when crisis management, bug hunting, merge requests, quality control, professional practice, and curiosity. I understand what questions to ask, and most of the things needed to create the thing—but my head outperforms my "from scratch" skill.
It's helped me home-cook my website, like using a baking-mix to keep from having to brownies, cookies, or cake from scratch. There's time, space, and place for from scratch cooking, just as much as there is for baking mixes.
I digress.
Two prompts, I've come out with a bare-bones php pagination component for my Kirby website.
I do the HTML/CSS from here.
But...what about the numbers?
Now. I'm at the point of selecting a number set for my "choose how many pages are in your next paginated page" select box.
What number range should I use? What scale?
There's always counting by 10's—10, 20, 30, etc. But, there's...more than 800 pages right now! That scale won't work for any sort of discovery.
What else?
25, 50, 75, 100, etc.
Sure, but that's a bit...boring.
How can we make it interesting?
So—I search the Internet for famous numerical progressions, happening upon lists of math-able numbers.
By math-able numbers: they're formulas for numerical progressions. A famous example, the Fibonacci Sequence:
F(n) = F(n − 1) + F(n − 2) for n ≥ 2, with F(0)=0 and F(1)=1.
...and that comes out to:
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, ...
There were some that I knew of, things like Primes, Fibonacci, Factorials, but found quite a few different ones!
- Tribonacci Numbers
- Lazy Caterer's Sequence
- Narayana's Cows yes! actually related to cows!
- Highly composite numbers
- Colossally abundant numbers
- Untouchable numbers
- Fortunate Numbers
- Weird numbers (fantastic definition: a natural number that is abundant but not semiperfect.)
- Magic numbers
- Magic constants
- Achilles numbers (another great definition: positive integers which are powerful but imperfect)
- Polite numbers
- Tetrahedral numbers
- Star Numbers
- Extravagant numbers
...and a few rabbit holes later, learning about:
...of which, has a super interesting quote:
In color theory, the triangular bipyramid was used to represent the three-dimensional color-order system in primary colors. German astronomer Tobias Mayer wrote in 1758 that each of its vertices represents a color: white and black are the top and bottom axial vertices, respectively, and the rest of the vertices are red, blue, and yellow.[22][23]
And that led me to discover Johann Heinrich Lambert's "Farbenpyramide" tetrahedron, from 1772. It's a painting of color relationships and mixing, starting with white, then adding pigments of yellow, red, and blue to the corner swatches...with levels of lightness and color mixtures!
Design Systems 101...from 1772!
What did I choose?
If you've gotten this far, I'd challenge you to look around and see if you can figure it out yourself! :D