Since its first episode in August of 2011, the Get Up On This podcast has offered a weekly collection of topics that people should ‘Get up on’. Meaning to know about, in this case before the topic “break” into the public eye … or sometimes because something was missed by the mainstream.
At the end of 2016 the host of the show, Jensen Karp, sent out the following request on Twitter …
Hey guys. Who can make a database so we can search when certain things were originally Get Up On subjects?
— Get Up On This (@GetUpOnJensen) November 29, 2016
As someone who feels he’s gotten a lot out of the podcast over the years. I thought I’d be able to develop something while also giving back to a show that I have long enjoyed.
Along with the initial concept to be able to search for topics I also created options for users to rate the picks. As the site is built using WordPress it was also possible to use ‘tags’ and categories’ to allow users to explore past episodes and picks much easier.
The site continues to have a steady number of users each week as new shows are posted. Recently the hosts of the show provided their thoughts on the website …
gotuponthis.com is an invaluable resource for our podcast, both to our fans and to ourselves. We’ve had fan-made sites in the past that catalogued our picks, but never were they this intuitive, well-designed, and user friendly. We both genuinely use this site as a resource on a weekly basis, as do our listeners. Liam has done an incredible job with this site, does it completely on his own and as a labor of love, and honestly, if we hired someone to make a site for us and spent months planning it out, we don’t think we could possibly think of a single improvement over what Liam has done. It’s near perfection.
– Matthew Robinson and Jensen Karp (Hosts of Get Up On This)
In developing the site, a key function that I was able to add was a adaptive menu. This being a website menu that can adapt well to the size of device the website is viewed on. Past websites I have worked on have used fixed breakpoints to decided when to hide the menu. This however, resulted in a lot of empty space, because at smaller breakpoints the full navigation wouldn’t fit.
As a solution, I wrote a Javascript function to judge the available space, then fit in as many navigation items as possible. Allowing the page to only hide individual nav links behind a menu button when needed. While at launch the site only had a few main menu links, this robust solution adapted over time.