Blog

Splitting Off a Visuals Page

The color picker gets its own page, two new mixer sliders, an "Apply to Own" shortcut, and a caching bug that made a working feature look broken.

Michael Roehn
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The color picker that used to sit at the bottom of the AI Journey page now has its own page: Visuals. It made sense to split it out — "how I use AI" and "pick a color theme for this site" were two different conversations sharing one scroll.

What's there now

  • Dark and Bright groups, four studies each, instead of one dark set and a single fixed bright look
  • Two live mixers under "Own" — one dark, one bright — each with sliders for two accent colors, a background, and now the panel color behind the hero and the closing CTA band
  • An "Apply to Own" button under every study, so picking a preset can also hand its exact colors to the sliders instead of starting from a blank mix

A bug worth mentioning

I built "Apply to Own," tested it, and it worked. A few edits later, it didn't — no error anywhere, the colors just sat there. The cause wasn't the feature: this site stamps script.js, styles.css, and translations.js with a shared cache-busting version number, generated by a small script that's supposed to run before every deploy. I'd been skipping that step. The server had the new code the whole time; any browser that had already visited kept serving its old cached copy instead. One version-bump run and a fresh load fixed it. It runs before every deploy now, no exceptions.

Go mix your own theme, or get in touch if you want something built for a real project.

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