Community Link bundle?

Community Projects
1

A barrier I have to creating a wall of 88x31s is the fiddly effort of saving them, noting down where they came from, uploading the image, wrapping it in a link and an src link - phew! - over and over again until there’s a whole wall.

Consequently, the link sections on my site are curated and occasionally updated, but less generous than other people’s - and that’s as a person who loves surfing from site to site through link walls.

What if as our community, we had a zip file you could just download that has

  1. all the artwork in a folder (one from each community member)
  2. the code snippet

Then all anyone would have to do is wrap it in a div & pop it on their page. Every few months, you update your version. You could also collect links manually if you preferred, but you would never need to worry about forgetting people or not keeping track.

A second option would be a page on the cafe main site, which you could iframe to.

The goal would be a quick way to keep up with creating and maintaining a ‘here are all my neighbours at the cafe’ link section, which wasn’t reliant on memory & keeping up with things manually.

(It would also be trivial to wrap it in some basic javascript, to shuffle the order they’re displayed in, and create a ‘link of the day’ function so one person’s site is always highlighted)

4 Likes
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Personally, I think the thoughtful curation of manually making your links page is a feature rather than a bug. What makes button walls fun is that every one has a unique combination of links. Also, not having a button wall is totally fine - I don’t have one either, because I think the 88x31 format is too small. Another consideration is what if the package of links has a few sites you don’t like? Do you have to manually edit the code snippet every time?

With that said, a way to make it easier to collect, catalog, and update the buttons (or more generally, image assets for linking) of community members would be a great project. Perhaps a webpage that shows a table of urls and their corresponding buttons. You could even ask webmasters to include their button in a specific format on their homepage, so that you can periodically pull it from there to keep it updated.

3 Likes
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Ah yeah, that makes sense - & especially the social awkwardness of, what to do if there are people you don’t want to link to. very good idea to avoid creating a situation where that can flare up :sweat_smile: