Tramping.net.nz | Showcase 2
My tramping and cycling websites use an image slider plugin: Showcase 2, which was common in 2010. This is at the top of every webpage, with a multi-image slider on the section list pages and a matching single-image slider on individual webpages. It works really well on a desktop screen, but jQuery sliders have never worked on a cell phone. Because of jQuery limitations, I ended up with a workaround that shows a single image instead.
This didn’t matter a few years ago as a considerable majority of people used desktops. That has now reversed, and that fact means my website isn’t ranking highly on Google Search. Views are way down, probably by about 75%.
I stopped development on cycletrailsAustralia in 2012, and it worked well enough until it broke on cell phones. I then had to modify the webpage code with conditionals to produce just a single image on phones, while maintaining the slider on bigger screens.
My AI, Qwen, gave me some modern code routine alternatives. I chose an open-source plugin used by millions of websites worldwide and likely to be maintained: Splide.
I’ve been dreading the complexities of getting this slider to work, but I decided to reduce the difficulties by abandoning hidden captions. These don’t really work on a minute screen.
I started on the first slider, a simple single image, and it worked straight away. There were another 13 sections to update with multiple images, but it was nowhere near as difficult as I had anticipated. I think it took 48 hours to get everything running smoothly on both large and small screens.
Hooray! It was good to have this resolved so quickly after spending two weeks getting my pop-up slideshows with captions to work flawlessly.