The Plots of Jabba's Palace

Back in first year of college (yes way back when) we had a module where we learned HTML. Part of that module was to create a website which was to demonstrate our understanding of HTML and to show our ability to link between multiple pages. I decided to create a site which was based on the book that I was reading at the time, which was the collection of short stories called Tales from Jabba's Palace. I had the idea of documenting some of the different plots that were happening around the time of the rescue of Han Solo in Return of the Jedi.

I had uploaded these pages to an old blog repository when I was adding all my old sites to GitHub. Over the last few weeks I've been updating that site with the goal of adding it to this blog. The basic outline and the copy is all the same as the original. I have updated the HTML to use definition lists instead of tables (because everything was tables back then) and I updated all the images as the originals were very small or of poor quality.

It also demonstrated the change in capabilities of CSS and HTML over the last 22 years or so. Back then it was quite difficult to get a three column layout or to get rounded corners. The only reliable options were tables and curved GIF images and GIF spacers. Now it's much easier with CSS (here I used a combination of Grid or Flex for layouts) and border-radius for rounded boxes. Even making some changes for mobile sites (which wasn't really a thing back then) was relatively simple to implement with media queries.

Adding to this site with all the differences in layout and styles was also fairly simple. Next.js allowed me to create a new layout component specifically for the Jabba's Palace site which hasn't affected the overall site layout.

All in all, it was a fairly enjoyable exercise.

Jabba's Palace
GitHub Repository
Pull Request
Original Code

Paddy