The “On This Day” page use to pull in a manually written loop of each year the site’s been around, which had a few problems:

1. remembering to manually update that loop every year was difficult for me.
2. it was showing only the featured image and not all the attachments, so you were missing out on some quality images if you didn’t click through
3. the images were all squished into a same sized 145 pixel box which looked like utter shit.
4. as of 2018 there were 260 images loading on every page load, that’s a huge resource hog!

I’ve fixed this by making it a dynamic loop of all the years for the posts, showing all the attachments and using some js magic to get the images to make a beautiful wall of images, then using that dynamic loop to spit out just the year you’ve selected to the page instead of all 200+ images at once.

This does a couple cool things, most notably makes it all dynamic so I don’t have to touch this again when 2019 comes through and make it look cool as fuck when you resize the window.  It also takes a significant bit of load from the server.

Speaking of the server, it should be much peppier now that I’ve increased some memory pools to be 10gigs and not 1 gig.  I’m going to monitor and see if I can increase it to 20 gigs, but I want to be sure that everything is stable before I start blowing up the memory like that.

And finally speaking of blowing things up, the related images have returned!  Let’s see if I can keep them around for longer than a week this time!