The Bunting Finally Stays Up

For about two months, the string of bunting hanging above the main games floor kept coming loose at one corner, almost always right when someone opened the site on a phone and the layout shifted by a fraction of an inch. It sounds like nothing much, and in the scheme of the whole club it genuinely was nothing much, but a sagging paper triangle in the header photo bothered me more than almost any actual bug in the games themselves ever has.

The first fix I tried was tape, in the metaphorical sense — a quick patch that is not really a fix at all, just tape pretending to be one. The second attempt used a different image crop that solved the sagging corner neatly enough, but it made the whole strip look oddly lopsided the moment you widened the browser window past a certain point. Neither version survived even a single week before someone spotted the problem again and told me about it.

What actually worked was embarrassingly simple in hindsight: instead of treating the bunting as one long stretched image, I split it into small repeating triangles that tile properly no matter how wide or narrow the screen happens to be. It should honestly have been the first thing I tried rather than the third, but that is more or less how most of my fixes go — the obvious answer arrives right after the two clumsy ones.

There is a small lesson tucked into all of this about not reaching for the quickest patch when a slightly bigger rebuild would actually hold up over time. I do not always take that lesson to heart, if I am honest, but this time I did, and the header finally looks the way I first pictured it back when I sketched the whole club out on paper, long before any of it existed as actual code.

If you happen to spot any other corner of the site that looks slightly off on your particular screen, the contact page is by far the fastest way to let me know about it. I read every message that comes through, even the short ones that are just a screenshot and a single line saying something looks strange, and more often than not those messages are exactly how problems like the bunting one get noticed and fixed.