One aspect of developing my art grid was moving away from the Next image component and choosing a more flexible option with special css.

There are still plenty of spots on the site I wanted to keep using it, though! This week, I wanted to jot down why.

CLS

Content Layout Shift is something I've written about a few times. Surprisingly, this is my first touch on images, the largest culprits of creating CLS!

A page is typically peppered with images throughout. An image can be wholly optimized to be very lightweight, but can still contribute to a negative user experience if the dimensions are not accounted for.

Say you're reading this blog. And a put an image right above this paragraph. If an image FINALLY loads as you're reading this, all of a sudden this paragraph is pushed down and now you have to scroll to find your place. Ugh.

The Solution

The way to mitigate this is pretty simple: Set dimensions on your images.

Easy if you already know what they are: Use css to set explicit widths and heights. You can even use media queries to set them depending on the screen size.

It gets a little trickier if you're doing this dynamically, not knowing what dimensions your image will be. The best bet, then, is to set a container for the image to reside in , and have the image fill the container. Thinking of a div with an img child.

Next Image Component

It's not too involved to code this yourself, but Next.js comes out of the box with a component to handle this along with many other goodies. The Image Component in Next offers Size optimization for local images and lazy loading.

Here I'm using the component for my albums page

import React from 'react';
import Image from 'next/image';
import Link from 'next/link';

const MusicGrid = ({ albums }) => {
  return (
    <>
      <section className="music_display">
        {albums.map((album) => (
          <article key={album.title}>
            {/* <Link href={album.link}> */}
            <Link href={`/${album.slug}`}>
              <a data-test="musicGridLink">
                <Image src={album.coverURL} width="245" height="245" />
                <span>{album.title}</span>
              </a>
            </Link>
          </article>
        ))}
      </section>
    </>
  );
};

export default MusicGrid;

And here is what's generated to the DOM. It's a huge sample, but you can find a few interesting points in there:

The key pieces being the srcset used for different sized images generated for free. These are made with externally sourced images, interestingly enough, but they're generated by the component to handle rendering specifically to the page!

<article>
  <a data-test="musicGridLink" href="/forest"
    ><span
      style="
        box-sizing: border-box;
        display: inline-block;
        overflow: hidden;
        width: initial;
        height: initial;
        background: none;
        opacity: 1;
        border: 0;
        margin: 0;
        padding: 0;
        position: relative;
        max-width: 100%;
      "
      ><span
        style="
          box-sizing: border-box;
          display: block;
          width: initial;
          height: initial;
          background: none;
          opacity: 1;
          border: 0;
          margin: 0;
          padding: 0;
          max-width: 100%;
        "
        ><img
          style="
            display: block;
            max-width: 100%;
            width: initial;
            height: initial;
            background: none;
            opacity: 1;
            border: 0;
            margin: 0;
            padding: 0;
          "
          alt=""
          aria-hidden="true"
          src="data:image/svg+xml,%3csvg%20xmlns=%27http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%27%20version=%271.1%27%20width=%27245%27%20height=%27245%27/%3e" /></span
      ><img
        src="/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fres.cloudinary.com%2Fcpadilla%2Fimage%2Fupload%2Ft_optimize%2Fchrisdpadilla%2Falbums%2Fforest.jpg&amp;w=640&amp;q=75"
        decoding="async"
        data-nimg="intrinsic"
        style="
          position: absolute;
          top: 0;
          left: 0;
          bottom: 0;
          right: 0;
          box-sizing: border-box;
          padding: 0;
          border: none;
          margin: auto;
          display: block;
          width: 0;
          height: 0;
          min-width: 100%;
          max-width: 100%;
          min-height: 100%;
          max-height: 100%;
        "
        srcset="
          /_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fres.cloudinary.com%2Fcpadilla%2Fimage%2Fupload%2Ft_optimize%2Fchrisdpadilla%2Falbums%2Fforest.jpg&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 1x,
          /_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fres.cloudinary.com%2Fcpadilla%2Fimage%2Fupload%2Ft_optimize%2Fchrisdpadilla%2Falbums%2Fforest.jpg&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 2x
        " /><noscript
        ><img
          srcset="
            /_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fres.cloudinary.com%2Fcpadilla%2Fimage%2Fupload%2Ft_optimize%2Fchrisdpadilla%2Falbums%2Fforest.jpg&amp;w=256&amp;q=75 1x,
            /_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fres.cloudinary.com%2Fcpadilla%2Fimage%2Fupload%2Ft_optimize%2Fchrisdpadilla%2Falbums%2Fforest.jpg&amp;w=640&amp;q=75 2x
          "
          src="/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fres.cloudinary.com%2Fcpadilla%2Fimage%2Fupload%2Ft_optimize%2Fchrisdpadilla%2Falbums%2Fforest.jpg&amp;w=640&amp;q=75"
          decoding="async"
          data-nimg="intrinsic"
          style="
            position: absolute;
            top: 0;
            left: 0;
            bottom: 0;
            right: 0;
            box-sizing: border-box;
            padding: 0;
            border: none;
            margin: auto;
            display: block;
            width: 0;
            height: 0;
            min-width: 100%;
            max-width: 100%;
            min-height: 100%;
            max-height: 100%;
          "
          loading="lazy" /></noscript></span
    ><span>Forest</span></a
  >
</article>

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Sangin'! With Lucy!

🤫🦭😴

A visit to the homepage of this very site on desktop will show the neat instagram-like image grid of my sketches! Now that much of my blog is visual, and since it's been a year of me drawing, it's time to make a nice display for my drawings.

Creating it with my current setup has been interesting! I'll walk you through it, covering extracting the images and piping them through Next's server side handler.

Parsing Markdown

The setup for my blog is through static files. Meaning, every post is a markdown file, with metadata included at the top of the file, and the content following. It looks something like this:

---
title: Snivy & Mareep
tags:
  - Art
date: '2023-09-01T10:35:07.322Z'
---

![Charge!!!](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpadilla/image/upload/t_optimize/chrisdpadilla/blog/art/sniviiandmareep_cldzmr.jpg)

Pokémon — the gateway to doodling on math homework.

...

It makes for quick writing and keeps my content portable.

The challenge with this approach, though, is that my images are hosted off site and they are displayed directly through the markdown. A fantastic beginner programmers challenge, if you're ever curios to test out a new language, is to:

• Access a text file
• Parse it
• Return the results

I did just that with a few functions:

export const getImageValuesFromMarkdown = (md) => {
  const regex =
    /!\[[^\]]*\]\((?<filename>.*?)(?=\"|\))(?<optionalpart>\".*\")?\)/g;
  return Array.from(md.matchAll(regex)).map((res) => res[1]);
};


export function getAllArtImages(
  fields = ['content', 'slug', 'tags', 'date'],
  options = {}
) {
  const slugs = getPostSlugs();
  let posts = slugs
    .map((slug) => getPostBySlug(slug, fields))
    // Filter false values (.DS_STORE)
    .filter((post) => post)
    // sort posts by date in descending order
    .sort((post1, post2) => (post1.date > post2.date ? -1 : 1));

  const regex = new RegExp('Art', 'i');
  posts = posts.filter((post) => post.tags?.some((e) => regex.test(e)));

  if (options.filter) {
    posts = posts.filter(options.filter);
  }

  if (options.skip) {
    posts = posts.slice(options.skip);
  }

  if (options.limit) {
    posts = posts.slice(0, options.limit);
  }

  const images = [];
  posts.forEach((post) => {
    const postImages = getImageValuesFromMarkdown(post.content);
    postImages.forEach((src) =>
      images.push({
        src: src,
        slug: post.slug,
      })
    );
  });

  return images;
}

getAllArtImages handles a fair amount of logic for getting all of my markdown files, sorting, and only grabbing the attributes I need. That includes only getting posts with the Art tag!

The interesting part here is down in the forEach loop. There, I'm calling getImageValuesFromMarkdown, which uses a regex to find all of the instances of a markdown denotation for an image. In the file, it looks like this:

![Charge!!!](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpadilla/image/upload/t_optimize/chrisdpadilla/blog/art/sniviiandmareep_cldzmr.jpg)

That all gets massaged into an array of objects with the image source and markdown slug so that the images link to the post.

Displaying Images

From there, it's as simple as calling the method in getServerSideProps() on the page I want to display the grid:

export async function getServerSideProps() {
  const images = getAllArtImages().slice(0, 6);

  return {
    props: {
      images,
    },
  };
}

From there, there's nothing too fancy about it. The react component is simply looping through the images:

import Link from 'next/link';
import React from 'react';

const ArtGrid = ({ images }) => {
  return (
    <>
      <section className="art_display">
        {images.map((image, i) => (
          <article key={image.src} className={`${i > 0 ? 'hideonmobile' : ''}`}>
            <Link href={`/${image.slug}`}>
              <a data-test="musicGridLink">
                <div
                  className="artgridimage"
                  style={{
                    height: '250px',
                    width: '250px',
                    background: 'transparent no-repeat center',
                    backgroundSize: 'cover',
                    margin: 'auto',
                    backgroundImage: `url('${image.src}')`,
                  }}
                />
              </a>
            </Link>
          </article>
        ))}
      </section>
    </>
  );
};

export default ArtGrid;

I'm using the div with a background image set to center the images. Not the most accessible way, but the most-sane way to handle centering images without distorting their aspect ratio.

And that's all there is to it!

Are there tradeoffs to this approach? Why, yes there are! A future concern of mine is for the time when the number of files gets too large, and starts slowing things down. My next step is to take a look into a caching system: Generating the list of images once and saving the results so that this call doesn't happen every time the server receives a request.

A post for another day!

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More fingerstyle fun! 🕺👇