EI-6.5 — Media, Evidence & Portfolio Presentation
Status: COMPLETE
Date: 2026-08-08
Objective
Improve the presentation and use of production media where verified assets materially strengthen paco.org, without reopening EI-1 editorial classifications or violating the EI-2 media architecture.
Validation and implementation
Governed current-site portrait
The About page uses the governed production asset images/avatar.jpg. Removed legacy portrait paths are not restored. EI-6.6 protects this dependency in the repository quality gate.
The Loudmouth
The Loudmouth remains the principal media-rich historical collection. Its production scans remain local under images/loudmouth/, while Google Drive remains the archival/master corpus. The gallery presentation uses a responsive grid, keyboard-visible focus treatment, and locally controlled assets. Existing delivery behavior preserves lazy loading and asynchronous decoding for gallery images.
Historical scans are not destructively recompressed merely to improve visual uniformity. Legibility and preservation remain more important than arbitrary byte targets.
Journalism & Media Portfolio
The consolidated Journalism & Media Portfolio remains intentionally evidence-driven. The surviving scans and PDFs are acknowledged as archival masters, but no speculative production copies were restored simply to decorate the page. Individual artifacts should be promoted to production only when they can be verified against archival masters and materially improve the portfolio.
This preserves the editorial decision made in EI-5: a coherent professional record is preferable to reconstructing the former maze of portfolio microsites.
Decorative interface media
The site-experience work also replaced the former yellow status-button presentation with a Hayes Smartmodem-inspired CSS connection panel. It is interface decoration rather than historical evidence, is hidden from the accessibility tree with the surrounding decorative status bar, and settles to a static connected state when reduced motion is requested.
Media governance preserved
EI-6.5 does not change the permanent architecture:
- Google Drive = archival/master media repository;
- GitHub = production media required by paco.org;
- no production hotlinking from Google Drive;
- DELETE-classified/private historical media remains ineligible for production restoration;
- Loudmouth scans retain preservation priority over aggressive optimization.
Result
EI-6.5 is complete. Verified production media remains controlled and purposeful, The Loudmouth retains a usable gallery presentation, the About portrait uses the governed asset, and the professional portfolio remains evidence-driven rather than being padded with speculative restoration.