maggieappleton/arbour

A growing place

Designer-anthropologist-developer growing wild code and gardening public knowledge.

I write public notes and create illustrated essays on my digital garden

arbour's Issues

We have some way to define post types and expected properties

Somewhere in the repo there's a place we can declare and edit all the post types and their properties.

Draft schemas (may change - good assumed starting point)

Post
(Generic type that covers what I call both "notes" and "essays" – only diff is length and done-ness. This is the base type for more specific post types)

• Title
• Description?
• Cover image?
• Start date
• Updated date?
• Growth stage
• Assumed audience?
• Confidence?
• Importance?
• Tags/topics (these are thematic: "biochemistry", "javascript", "interface design")
• (Content)
• (Backlinks)

Book

• Title
• Author
• Cover
• External link?

Micropost

• (Content)
• (Backlinks)

Question

• (Content)
• (Backlinks)

Belief/Claim/Zettle

• (Content)
• (Backlinks)

Maybe these are implicit as part of the folder structure and metadata within files or maybe it's explicit somewhere like types.json?

---

Assuming we should keep these super simple, but in theory (technically savvy) users should be able to build other custom types with unique properties in the system, such as:

• conference talk
• podcast episode
• lesson plan
• code snippet
• sketch
• molecule (maybe I'm a biochemist IDK)
• case study
• project
• design pattern
• film
• data visualisation

Explore colour themes and vibes

The vibes are very important

Natural, neutral, greens, browns, woody stuff, warm beige lights. Some brighter green/yellow accents.

Subtle dynamic elements would be great. Like slightly shifting hues based on the reader's current time. Slow gradient animations. Give the space a bit of life.

Make a mood board.

Resistant to having light/dark mode shift.
Maybe users can pick one or the other, but continuous background shifts fuck with image displays and contrast (unless I decide I reallllly want to do the dynamic colour shift from day > night).

Have at least 2-3 colour vibe schemes to pick from

Write spec for backlinks and forward links

Exploratory designs for micro posts

What does it look like to view a single micro post?
What do micro posts look like as collections?
How do micro posts look when embedded in macro posts?
What actions and metadata are visible on a micro post?
How do you create a new micro post? What's the authoring experience like?
What metadata makes sense on micro posts?

Setup docs website on Starlight

https://starlight.astro.build/

Posts have a visible list of forward and backlinks

Somewhere on each post page there's a list of linked posts.

I think we can just group forward and backlinks together. I'm unconvinced there's much value in differentiating them.

But maybe to play it safe we should have some metadata on the links that says whether it's a front or backlink and then we could distinguish them with icons or something else subtle.

Setup basic blog architecture

• There are posts
• There is an index page of all posts
• You can click on posts and view them
• Posts have metadata and it's rendered to the page

Write spec for micro and macro post types

Pick typography – both free and $$ options

Likely Inter 4.0 as part of the free option. Pick a nice serif to pair it with.

Commercial Type for fancy options.

Maybe Blanco by Foster Type

Exploratory designs for navigation patterns

Some initial exploration in Figma of navigation patterns for:

• index pages
• navigating to other posts from a single post

Buy me a croissoint

Write spec for syndication of micro posts

Image optimisation

• Decide on how we're doing image optimisation
• Implement image optimisation
• Draft up docs explaining how image optimisation works

Write spec for version control

Need user journeys for both writers and readers

• What if you just want to fix one typo? What's not a new version
• Writer needs to make manual new versions

Unique URLs for each version
Canonical URL always links to first version

List of previous versions in sidebar
Be able to view previous versions

Use redirects to always sends users to the latest version

• E.g. name.com/ideas -> name.com/ideas/v0
• Clear signposting that you're on the latest version and there are previous version
• If a new version is added, add a redirect.

Write documentation intro on WTF Arbour is

Why are we building this?
What does this have that we don't think other solutions do?
Why does it need to exist in the world?

What's the guiding philosophy here?

List all the core features.

Define the target audience to let people self-select in / out of using it.

Say what the requirements are. Both in terms of the person's skills and technical knowledge and what they need to have installed, like Git and NPM.

Exploratory designs for macro posts

Explore designs for a single macro post (longform)

• Metadata displays
  • Linked posts
  • Version history
  • Growth stage
  • Type
  • Title
  • Dates
  • Description?
  • Cover image?
• Content layout
• Common components

Decide on the core features, nice-to-haves, and luxuries

What's absolutely essential – you couldn't use Arbour without it?

What can we save for future versions?

Break core features down into which ones we should implement first, second, etc.