community.quantumland.art website

[omarcostahamido]

This Community. actually has a website: community.quantumland.art! It serves as a landing page with quick links to this forum, a database, and some FAQs. The Database will serve as dynamic archive shared by the community. Entries on this database are of one of the following types: creative work, event, person, software, and writing. No actual copies of the works will be available in the database, but only links to it, and metadata. The advantage of the system being used is that each entry can be easily cross-referenced. The FAQs, will serve as a help center/knowledge base with frequently asked questions about the website and the forum, including instructions on how to contribute. The short version of it is:

• the forum is the main platform for this community to interact, the website exists to hold support articles and a database of entries;
• anyone can read and (with a free github account) easily post on the forum, and those willing to contribute to the database can open issues and pull requests;
• regular active members will be invited to directly collaborate in the management of the database issues and PRs and improve the FAQs.

Some more context on the technical implementation of the website (early Oct 2023):

Initially, I started writing this website with vitepress but then decided to move to something really simple... Notion! Simple, that is, in the way you can add more content to it - the WYSIWYG and the multiple database views are great. This is important since the ultimate goal is for the website to host a database in itself that non tech-savy users will be able to contribute to. I am thus using Notion as the backend CMS, this makes it really easy super fast to update it. However, as you will notice, this is not a speed optimized website when rendering on client browsers, and there have been a couple of occasions where it just stopped working (because Notion changed something on their end without notice). Suggestions from real tech-savy users are welcome: the repository is here. And yes, I would much prefer to use something like AFFiNE or Anytype, because of the local-first paradigm, but the problem is that they are simply not there yet - no databases or no way to quickly share it (have it automatically update the live version, or sync with github pages), respectively. I also tried to avoid relying on a paid subscription service like super.so to help publish the notion workspace since this has been mostly a single person effort and unsponsored. Additionally, I want this to live online as long as possible, and on that note, a regular notion export backup on github every couple of months is yet to be implemented (wayback machine won't save this).

Some more context on the technical implementation of the website (late Oct 2023):

As explained in the thread below, successive frustrations with notion deployment, not to mention the ever present ghost of not being able to easily backup and actually truly make it open source, has forced me to shift gears once again, and move back in the direction of setting the database website to be completely hosted on github, using a Jekyll-based digital garden paradigm.

Some more context on the conceptual implementation of the website (late Nov 2024):

A year has passed and some interesting reflections slowly take place. The landscape of knowledge base platforms as expanded and evolved (see for example how far gitbook has come). Community. is and will continue to be an ever evolving project - the adopted digital garden paradigm reinforces it. In that sense too, a new change could be considered as long as it doesn't represent a loss of the existing information, or a loss of the original motivation. Unless something dramatic happens, my approach towards this project is to make it in such a way that it can outlive me.

OCH
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[omarcostahamido]

You may have noticed that the website is now live only thanks to potion.so. Notion keeps breaking things. This situation, and this solution, is not ideal, for several reasons, and I am in the process of creating a digital garden and transitioning everything there. I will still need to figure out a way to display interactive tables though (#24 ). Will eventually create a page on the FAQs to explain a little about the inspiration for doing so. If anyone here has experience with jekyll digital gardens, lmk!

OCH

[omarcostahamido]

great news:
[community.quantumland.art] new website preview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZWI2_LYIWo

[community.quantumland.art] populating database entries with obsidian
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBThPTcROaU

[omarcostahamido]

some great brainstorm just now on #79
an additional technical reflection below on how to balance out making direct contributions more accessible:
please remember that community.quantumland.art is a really focussed implementation, and might I add an environment eco-friendly one, that doesn't rely on heavy stack like wordpress and php, nor continuously running backend workers. (except for those microsoft uses for running github as a whole 😇 ). So it is not immediately doable to add a form on a page and get it to manage some backend process and a postgres/sql database. One could still think of a clever integration that would articulate with github API itself to bring those submissions into issues on the repo or the discussion forum... and that was the direction that I was trying to explore with #54

also, a correction is due here. Previously, on the opening post of this thread I wrote:

anyone can read and (with a free github account) post on the forum, but only regular active members will be invited to directly collaborate in the management of the database and FAQs.

this was the case, when it was running on notion, but, as you realize, it is no longer true. Anyone with a free github account can propose a pull request to the database. But it is strongly recommended to start by opening an issue (or better yet, replying to a currently open one if relevant) so that others can be aware of the task that you want to work on and not overlap.