Week 024 — The Coming Soon Page and the Design Push

A single conversation made srchParty real in a new way.

Week of April 28, 2025

Progress

A conversation with a friend on Tuesday led directly to launching a coming soon page for srchParty. Setting it up required provisioning a DigitalOcean droplet, configuring DNS, recreating the logo at the right dimensions, and putting together a basic page. It's live now. The domain points somewhere. There's a URL to share.

The rest of the week was design work — the kind that had been deferred for months. The items page got a real layout pass: consistent item card heights, a status-based add-item button at the top of the list, status-colored borders, and item cards that are clickable across the whole container (using JavaScript, which was actually part of the original implementation and had just been left dormant). Found and lost badges were cleaned up.

The header and footer got desktop-specific treatment. On desktop: logo and navigation together, user info bar across the top, secondary navigation items moved to the footer. On mobile: hamburger on the left, logo centered, user area on the right, with a shadow when the menu is open. Footer navigation went horizontal with copyright on the same line.

Item page mobile styling was completed: save button enables on change (detecting whether any field was actually modified), visual design improvements including status "chicklets" in the item header.

The Hard Part

A PHP fatal error was hiding as a missing closing HTML element. The item page was breaking in a strange way — JavaScript functions were undefined, the footer wasn't rendering. The usual culprit for that pattern is an unclosed <div>. It was actually a PHP error thrown when trying to access lostItemDto on an item that wasn't lost. The PHP error mid-page was truncating the output, which looked like broken HTML. After half an hour of checking element structure, the actual error was found in the logs.

The Question That Appeared

The coming soon page is live. At some point this shifts from a side project to something with a public URL and expectations. Not a problem yet, but a different kind of motivation.

Next Week

UI design is mostly done for the key pages. Time to get back to the owner experience — the item page when a found event has happened.