Devlog #3

Okay so update from the last one where I was basically just doing CSS and hoping for the best. Turns out trusting the process was, in fact, the move because somehow I went from “vague brass and navy colors on a div” to an entire working site. I genuinely didn’t expect to get here especially with college still eating my whole week.

The NASA API stuff is finally hooked up and actually works now not just “works in theory” but actually pulling real pictures for real dates. Prev/next day, jumping to today, random date, all of it fetches properly. There’s a whole archive view now too where you can browse a full month at once instead of clicking one day at a time forever and an “on this day” strip that shows the same date from past years which honestly turned out way cooler than I expected!

Also added a logbook thing so you can save entries you like and they stick around in localStorage. No backend, no login, just quietly sitting in your browser. Feels good having something that persists without having to build a whole account system for a side project. ALso uh, I spent an embarrassing amount of time on tiny details that probably nobody will consciously notice but me.. a little reticle cursor over the image instead of the default pointer, a custom loading animation instead of a plain spinner, a weird little rotated stamp on the corner of each plate that just says “field log” because I thought it was cute. None of it needed to exist BUT all of it exists anyway.

Still caught a genuinely embarrassing amount of bugs going through it though. Had a straight up syntax error sitting in my object literal for who knows how long, had the archive endpoint pointed at a fetch() call instead of an actual url string and had a whole render function that hid the plate right after trying to show it so nothing ever displayed and I could not figure out why for a long time. Felt very smart once I found each one and very stupid for how long it took.

Still following the “learn it from a tutorial not from AI” thing I keep telling myself and it’s actually paying off! I can explain almost every part of this now instead of just going “uh, it works, don’t ask me why” Not fully done yet, still want to poke at a couple things. That’s it for this one. Back to pretending I don’t have an assignment due tomorrow (I actually have 3).

Also, quick note on why this is one giant entry instead of three; most of this stretch was JS work and the CSS barely moved while I was doing it. Didn’t feel like there was a real “here’s a visual update” moment to split off on its own so instead of forcing three thin entries out of what was really one continuous push on the JS side, I just let it be one entry that covers all of it, hope that makes sense!