61–66 of 66 posts
In the meantime I've made a big update to the Airtable with links to tools, examples and further reading:
https://airtable.com/shrYY94GrqVB4HUsi/tblHPrdomiPbLpod6/viw...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not really analogous and kind of misses some of the other aspects the author talks about. Excel doesn’t cover the publishing and discovery aspect. It is absolutely atrocious from a machine usability and schema perspective, nevermind performance, etc. Even if you think excel does address those, I think the shortcomings of the format should rule it out. It is better to have a more powerful tool, and fix the usab…
Yeah, but I think you're underestimating what the grandparent post is saying. The people who would PAY for some of these functions are already making do with Excel. And microsoft has responded in kind by increasing Excel's ability to do, well, everything. I'm pretty sure if someone wanted to include those features the article is talking about on top of Excel, they would. Just last week, we saw someone add onto Excel…
Excel as a format is an awful abomination of XML, and the program itself is an awful experience that people just stick with due to a mix of Stockholm syndrome and inertia. It’s not exactly something I would ever want to “aim for”.
Substack is an interesting example. It's great for written content with a few images, which mostly looks the same everywhere. But it lacks great customisation features that I think a database would need, because that stuff is hard to do.
If I had to propose a solution, it would be this: if you want to do a small database, do it. Experimentation in the cyberspace is very cheap. These days you have lots of resources for everything online. It can be intimidating, and can lead to analysis paralysis. I'm supposed to be a professional developer and still struggle with that. But one thing that has helped me a lot recently is to try stuff, see if it works, if it fails, ask questions (to either real people or ChatGPT/Copilot, Copilot is especially valuable to get in a "just keep writing, editing comes later" mood). It's not always fun, in fact it can be quite frustrating, but that's how things are.
In the end, this is about decentralisation and you can't have proper decentralisation if you don't also decentralise the skills, the know-how. For example, there has been a lot of talk about Mastodon as a decentralised alternative to Twitter. And it is one. But if you simply go from being a user on Twitter to being a user on Mastodon, well you don't regain much control. On the other hand if you try running a small instance, even just a local instance to see how it works, or maybe add a few feature to your preferred client (it can be code, but it could also be helping translation, or maybe a color scheme (you wouldn't believe how many color scheme are barely usable when you're colorblind)), well then you start being in control.
The "small database" in question is, well, an HTML page. It can be shared and passed around by selecting the portions of it that you need and pressing Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V. Search is accomplished by the browser using Ctrl+F. Collaboration can take many forms - wikis, comments, forums, live editing. Links between databases are what URL links are. The database that OP is looking for is a page of text (for unstructured data) or somewhat structured solutions like CSV, JSON, or YAML.
Now, yes, there are certain participants on the WWW who make poor web design choices that cause agreed-upon functionality to break. E.g. unnecessary pagination or accordions breaking Ctrl+F, not offering data for download, not having useful URL paths etc.
I run a little agency in the UK who works with museums to help them with digital. A large part of this is getting collections online. Some years ago we commissioned a developer to make CultureObject[0], a free and open source WordPress plugin to make it easier to ingest collections data for display on the web. At the heart it's a glorified data importer, and many people just use the CSV mode to sync and import collec…
I see you decided on Wordpress, if you were going to use a CMS I think Drupal 7 would have been a good choice. Drupal has concept of entities and views. An entity as the name suggests is essentially a table and you can add all sorts of different fields to it. From simple text and number fields to images and fields that lookup other entities thus creating relationships between entities. Views is another construct that…
That being said, I found it much, much easier to develop than WordPress.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but I think you're underestimating what the grandparent post is saying. The people who would PAY for some of these functions are already making do with Excel. And microsoft has responded in kind by increasing Excel's ability to do, well, everything. I'm pretty sure if someone wanted to include those features the article is talking about on top of Excel, they would. Just last week, we saw someone add onto Excel…
And PowerPoint is Turing complete, so I guess we may as well just throw away all these other programming languages and use that going forward because lots of people already use PowerPoint? Excel as a format is an awful abomination of XML, and the program itself is an awful experience that people just stick with due to a mix of Stockholm syndrome and inertia. It’s not exactly something I would ever want to “aim for”.
You and I may think so, but why would it matter for the end user?
"and the program itself is an awful experience that people just stick with due to a mix of Stockholm syndrome and inertia"
Disagree. For the purpose of what Excel was made for, it seems reasonable. Or rather, I've yet to see what benefits alternative experiences produce. For the vast 90% of users, Excel is a 1NF/2NF db, emphasized on visually viewing their data. It's dead simple to enter, dead simple to share, and reasonable easy to add some constraints, some linkage, and show data trends.