Richard Gate is my brother-in-law. I’ve mentioned him once before.

I put together a website for him in February 2007. I think it’s a great little site that does precisely what it needs to. It introduces you to an artist’s work. I worked with him this week to provide something interesting on the main richardgate.com page. It’s a view of a large group of his paintings that display as you move your mouse over the browser window, or, in the case of mobile, as you move your finger over the display.

Technical Detail, for Programmers only

When I first built this site, I used PrototypeJS and Scriptaculous. In fact, it was one of my first usages of that library, and I was amazed and impressed with how it allowed me to do what at the time I called simply “DHTML” so easily. Still, the syntax was pretty ugly, and I had a large number of inline event handlers in the code. It was not a lot of fun to make changes to it because of that.

In 2010, I converted the site over to using jQuery instead, and that change has been great. The underlying HTML is now cleaner, and the attendant JavaScript is easier to read and maintain. And, when Rick wants to add something new, like a dazzling bit of animation on the main page, I can do it in just a few lines of code.

I invite you to visit richardgate.com and enjoy his work.