hello everyone hope everyone's enjoying their 2024 so far, even though the holidays are over and the dread is probably setting in!!!

I wanted to create a thread here to talk about my goals for the site this year and what I'd like to accomplish after looking at all the good work adjacent communities are putting out. In 2023, i got exposed heavy to the "personal web" as @Eternity would call it, and it's inspired me to want to do more with the community we have here. Sites like 32bit.cafe are doing amazing work at both providing web services and hosting community events on their discord and website. They have an email service, a Git instance, and regularly hold events like this one that inspire people to create. You've got another thriving community over at agoraroad that has their own regular blog group doing much of the same thing. I've also been a huge fan of https://bearblog.dev, a platform enabling people to get sites online painlessly in a few seconds. And sites that look great, to boot

Point is, I'd like to do more this year, and I categorized my goals into 2 main ideas: 1. increase usability of this site and 2. provide more resources to help people contribute to the personal web in meaningful ways

Technical Goals

1. Usability: Get sorting on the threads landing page ✅ (done) this is one that isn't super important in the grand scheme of things, but it will grow in usefulness as time goes on. As the site ages and more threads and posts are created, finding content you want to go back to is going to become harder. So to solve for this coming issue, simple thread sorting by replies, views, and last updated should be enough for a first iteration

2. Usability: Add Search ✅ (done)
   Search is another feature that adds a huge layer of usability to the site and it's really a pain that you can't do it today. This is really a must-have, especially now that there's more content to search through, and I apologize for dragging my feet on this because I was really hoping to spend time on it back in 2023

3. Usability: Add "threads view" to homepage ✅ (done)
   this forum is small, and I don't think the normal sub-forum view is the best way to find new threads being created. To increase visibility into new threads, I want to add a toggle to the homepage to view all threads in order of their updated_at timestamps and have that live as an account setting that users can choose.

Community Goals

1. Resources: start creating more blog posts that focus on creating a great website I've been making websites for about 7 years professionally and working on this one for over a year, and after combing through the resources out there on the personal web, I think I could hit more niche topics that don't get much attention. Things like accessibility, correct markup, writing secure javascript, basic server setup are topics that I think would be useful to people working on their personal sites, especially for people that want to do it from scratch, rather than relying on a service like neocities. I want to add to the getting started resources out there, while still being beginner-friendly

   • 4 tips for accessibility: https://blog.basementcommunity.com/4-overlooked-web-accessibility-issues/

   • everything i personally do when hosting a website on a new server: https://blog.basementcommunity.com/everything-i-do-when-hosting-a-website/

2. Resources: host more events that inspire people to create the one-year anniversary blog event went as well as I could hope for. We got about 5 submissions, after pretty light marketing for the event. I think I'd like to do more of this, maybe later in the year if the community grows more.

I'm open to feedback on these points as well! Any kind of feedback would be helpful, whether it has to do with what you like about other sites' search functions, what blog posts might be useful to you personally, anything is welcome!

Honestly, I'd love to see some posts about creating a great website, especially for someone like me who could learn a bit more about web dev and that good stuff :D

I don't know how easy or hard this would be, but something I unfortunately find causing friction with my posting is the markdown for a link. It's funny because that's literally how I do links on my personal website and I don't mind, but here when I just want to reply or say something as quickly as possible so that I can contribute and move on, I find it so arduous.

Lol, I guess imma hypocrite.

EDIT: Also, would it be possible to add working links in bio on the profile?

yes and yes. The second one is easy, but let me prioritize a wysiwyg because I said last year that i'd do it and never actual did

even if it was something barebones for links and images, that might make things a lot easier

edit: these are both done

this is also a cop-out answer, but you technically can just post a link and it will parse and be clickable: https://google.com

updating this post to say I was inspired by discourse's "view all threads" view. For example on https://discourse.32bit.cafe/latest.

I'm gonna add a toggle to the homepage so that you can switch between the traditional forums view and "view all threads" view, along with having it configurable with a user setting.

the issue with building your own software is that you're constantly looking at other forums that are doing it better god dam