scroll VS Omeka

It took me many years to get Scroll (https://scroll.pub/) to the point where I love it and am confident it will be the dominant language for writing going forward (replacing markdown).

I first had to invent Tree Notation (2017), which I got wrong on my first two tries (2012's Note and 2013's Space). Then I needed to invent Grammar (2017), and then I made the predecessor to Scroll called Dumbdown (2019). 2 years after that I shipped the first version of Scroll (2021).

Now we are on Scroll version 58 and it's blazing fast, very simple, extremely extendible, and scales very well.

It was 90% me for a while, but recently been very much a team effort.

It took a while to get right because it's a whole new kind of language, so there were a lot of mistakes that I made and had to undo, and it took a while to figure out exactly what was special about it and how to double down on that.

I recently started 2 new newspapers: https://longbeach.pub/ and http://hawaii.pub/. Very different from traditional newspapers in that they are: public domain, open source (view source on every page), and built using a new language (https://scroll.pub/).

Another cool site I found recently (via the replit guy) is https://www.rootclaim.com/

Very cool way to present arguments.

I'm thinking of taking that, as well as argdown, and building some easy to use keywords in scroll https://scroll.pub/

> Context-free grammars, and their associated parsing techniques, don't align well with real-world compilers, and thus we should deemphasise CFGs (Context-Free Grammars) and their associated parsing algorithms.

I think CFG are highly overrated. Top down recursive descent parsers are simple and allow you to craft more human languages. I think building top down parsers is something every dev should do. It's a simple technique with tremendous power.

I think the source code for Scroll (https://github.com/breck7/scroll/tree/main/grammar) demonstrates how liberating moving away from CFGs can be. Easy to extend, compose, build new backends, debug, et cetera. Parser, compiler, and interpreter for each node all in one place. Swap nodes around between languages. Great evolutionary characteristics.

I'll stop there (realizing I need to improve the docs and write a blog post).

- Uses a new language called Scroll: https://scroll.pub/

Also, put down Markdown and give our Scroll a try: https://scroll.pub

It now powers sites like my own blog (https://breckyunits.com/), knowledge bases like PLDB.com, and our first new public domain daily newspaper called the Long Beach Pub (https://longbeach.pub/1-3-2023.html).

> Java, Go, Javascript, Rust, etc are all regularly written with whitespace, and have tools to enforce such formatting, but they don't derive information from it.

Ah you reminded me. A curious phenomenon I've observed with Prettier in JS and fmt in Go is languages are moving to standardized whitespace, but as you said, not yet deriving information from it. I don't know enough about Java or Rust but I suspect they probably both have adopted a Prettier/fmt like convention where all code is formatted on save. So it seems like we are moving to a world where it will be a simple flip of a switch to then start having popular languages extract meaning from the whitespace.

> Also, Python has existed for decades and still there is little further adoption of indentation-sensitivity. It doesn't seem like a wave of indentation-sensitive languages will be coming any time soon.

I think it's coming big time this year. I think our Scroll (https://scroll.pub/) will catch fire and be the go to language instead of Markdown by the end of the year. Then with the increasing success of TreeBase (powering PLDB and others) we will start to see JSON fall for config formats and document storage databases. A lot more will happen to, data vis will be a big one, but those 2 I'm reasonably certain of happening in 2023.

GoAccess: https://goaccess.io/. I don't miss Google Analytics at all.

Loom. It's not open source I don't think but I'm digging it and excited when a public domain competitor comes out.

Our https://scroll.pub/. It's far beyond markdown at this point. I am able to not only write better but also maintain thousands of pages of content by hand (well, most of the credit for that belongs to Apple M1s, Sublime Text, git, MacOS, and Github). The stuff we are doing with it now would just not be possible with anything else, and what we're coming out with next year is super exciting. It's all public domain.

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/)