Phil Cifone

Work / Frame 01

Ronnie Bookbinder

Portfolio for a Main Line painter, with every painting shown in proportion to its real size. It has grown into an archive of her work.

Client
Painter portfolio & archive
Year
2022–present
Stack
Astro, Tailwind CSS, Nginx, GoAccess
Site
ronniebookbinder.com
Screenshot of the ronniebookbinder.com home page
01A — DESKTOP — 1440 × 900
Screenshot of the ronniebookbinder.com home page, on a phone
01B — PHONE

The ask

Ronnie Bookbinder is a painter on the Main Line outside Philadelphia. She taught for 43 years and shows at the Wayne Art Center and in juried shows around the region. She wanted one place to send people that showed her work properly and kept her exhibitions and press together. She did not want to learn a website builder. It started as a website and has slowly become an archive of about a hundred paintings.

What I built

A static site in Astro. It started from an open-source photography portfolio template, which I reworked for paintings. The whole gallery is driven by one YAML file that lists each painting’s title, collection and size.

The sizes matter. Most portfolio sites show a 12-inch canvas and a 40-inch canvas at the same size, which hides one of the first things a buyer asks about. Here every painting is drawn in proportion to its real dimensions. A “view on a wall” button in the lightbox hangs the open painting above a sofa, both drawn to scale.

Changes arrive by email. I make them, then send back a short summary of what changed and any questions, such as a missing title or a show that may have closed.

Ownership & longevity

The site is plain HTML, CSS and images served by nginx from a small VPS I run. There is no database, no plugins to update and no platform fee. Any web host could serve the built folder as it is. I also look after her domain, so it renews on time at a fair price.

Every image on the site is backed up and catalogued with its title, collection and actual size. Those are web images, though, not archive copies. Gathering full-resolution photographs of each painting is the work in progress.

A self-hosted Uptime Kuma monitor checks the site every minute. Instead of Google Analytics, a script on my own machine reads a month of the server’s logs with GoAccess and emails Ronnie a large-print summary that opens on her phone. Nobody else sees her visitors: no cookies, no trackers.

Links