Having finally sorted out my map, and even gotten the pop-ups to work the way I wanted them to, I have been attempting to build out a modal that will appear on load to provide an overview of the project and give users suggestions for exploring the map. The first half of that was not too bad. I was able to figure out how to create a modal that opened on a button push. But when I then tried to turn it into a modal that opened on load, things stalled out. I was using the modal from our previous group mapping project as a template and to my eyes everything appeared to be identical. I even had other people look at it, but to all appearances it should have been working, it just didn’t.

I finally created a blank project in VS Code and built the modal on an otherwise empty page. It worked. I was baffled. I wish I could say this story ends with me triumphantly finding a stray comma, or identifying a piece of conflicting code. It does not. I ended up starting over, carefully following the working page as a template, and when I finished it worked. I have no idea why it worked. I don’t know what I did wrong the first time. The sense of accomplishment that usually accompanies solving a problem is somewhat diminished when it feels as if you blindly stumbled your way to the solution, rather than actually understanding what had gone wrong.

My next task is to decide what I will use to build out the exhibit websites. Bootstrap Studio does not really like to build multi-page websites. So the question becomes, do I fight with it and try to find a workaround? Or do I just try to build it entirely from scratch. More on that next time.