Omeka VS Grav

Omeka

Omeka (https://omeka.org/) is OSS and has a REST API. Usually used by museums/libraries, but primary function is to upload and describe media files.

Adding new features to listmonk (mailing list / newsletter manager), preparing for its next release.

https://github.com/knadh/listmonk

Setting up and playing around with Omeka, a brilliant document publishing system, to help publish an archive of digitised physical books and documents.

https://omeka.org

If you Google "COVID-19 digital archive" you can also find a range of projects with different focuses. A benefit of technology is that now many organizations can create their own Omeka site and build a collection to document events in real time. However, I hope the post above demonstrates that while anyone can, any historian utilizing these various resources need to consider the practices undertaken to gather digital archives. We would never enter a physical archive and look at paper documents without questioning why those survive, what's missing, and thinking about voices specifically left out. A digital collection is the same, however they present an abundance of sources that can distract or distort- approaching the surviving records of the Salem Witch Trials is different from approaching a collection of 40,000 personal accounts. What voices might not volunteer a personal account to a website if it requires identifying information? How many images of people in masks at the grocery store do we need to deliberately save? These are not substantially different questions from what past historians and archivists thought about, but technology does reframe discussion. We'll see how many of these projects were developed with sustainability in mind.

Yes to this and other free, open source solutions such as Omeka.

I have not tried this yet but: https://wordpress.org/plugins/diviner-archive/ Or you might look into a non-Wordpress solution like Omeka https://omeka.org/

There are some great visual archives online that might serve as inspiration. Free tools to create them include Collection Builder, Omeka, and some other free, open source repository software. Most of their sites have links to projects that people have built using their tool, and I find them super inspiring to scroll through and get ideas for projects like yours.

A popular alternative is Omeka, which can't directly be used with WordPress but does have some workarounds to effectively show the digital collection in a frame. Search the Omeka forum for more info.

Omeka (https://omeka.org/)

There are flat-file CMSes (content management systems) like Grav: https://getgrav.org/

I guess, in some vague/broad sense, config-as-code systems also implement something similar? Maybe even OpenAPI schemas could count to some degree...?

In the old days, the "semantic web" movement was an attempt to make more webpages both human- and machine-readable indefinitely by tagging them with proper schema: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework. Even Google was on board for a while, but I guess it never saw much uptake. As far as I can tell it's basically dead now, both because of non-semantic HTML (everything as a React div), general laziness, and LLMs being able to parse things loosely.

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Side thoughts...

Philosophically, I don't know that capturing raw data alone as files is really sufficient to capture the nuances of any particular experience, or the overall zeitgeist of an era. You can archive Geocities pages, but that doesn't really capture the novelty and indie-ness of that era. Similarly, you can save TikTok videos, but absent the cultural environment that created them (and a faithful recreation of the recommendation algorithm), they wouldn't really show future archaeologists how teenagers today lived.

I worked for a natural history museum for a while, and while we were there, one of the interesting questions (well, to me anyway) was whether our web content was in and of itself worth preserving as a cultural artifact -- both so that future generations can see what exhibits were interesting/apropos for the cultures of our times, but also so they could see how our generation found out about those exhibitions to begin with (who knows what the Web will morph into 50 years later). It wasn't enough to simply save the HTML of our web pages, both because they tie into various other APIs and databases (like zoological collections) and because some were interactive experiences, like games designed to be played with a mouse (before phones were popular), or phone chatbots with some of our specimens. To really capture the experience authentically would've required emulating not just our tech stacks and devices, among other things.

Like for the earlier Geocities example, sure you could just save the old HTML and render it with a modern browser, but that's not the same as something like https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#http://geocities.com/ , which emulates the whole OS and browser too. And that still isn't the same as having to sit in front of a tiny CRT and wait minutes for everything to download over a 14.4k modem, only to be interrupted when mom had to make a call.

I guess that's a longwinded of critiquing "file over app": It only makes sense for things that are originally files/documents to begin with. Much of our lives now are not flat docs but "experiences" that take much more thought and effort to archive. If the goal is truly to preserve that posterity, it's not enough to just archive their raw data, but to develop ways to record and later emulate entire experiences, both technological and cultural. It ain't easy!

I took a more traditional approach, focusing on something that's "good enough", which in my case was a cheap VPS and an install of Grav: https://getgrav.org/

Some optional customization for page templates/fonts/CSS, some CI so I can build and deploy it inside of a Docker container, Matomo for analytics that respect privacy (which I already use elsewhere) and some additional web server configuration to hide anything interesting behind an additional login and I'm good. Maybe backups and uptime monitoring if I'm feeling brave, which is what most sites should also have (so copy + paste there).

All of that for under 100 euros per year (could also pay half of that if I didn't host anything else on the server), the blog has actually survived getting on the front page of HN once or twice and requires relatively little maintenance, at least a bit less than a proper install of WordPress, due to its larger surface area.

The best thing is that it's simple enough for me to understand how it works, to be able to move it anywhere as needed and use more or less plain Markdown for writing the blog posts. Here's a quick example of a recent post: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/ever-wanted-to-read-thousan...

Now all that's left is to find motivation to write more, but at least 90% of my time doesn't go into tinkering with custom fancy solutions, no matter how much I'd love that. Then again, nothing wrong with the alternatives either: 400 euros might be perfectly worth it for some, whereas working with static site generators or even custom CMSes would be a fun experience for others!

I'd check out Grav. https://getgrav.org/

Also, there is a CMS called Grav. Both Gravity and Grav use a very similar (but not identical) font for their logo.

I would use a flat file cms like https://getgrav.org