Croft 6

A hack from my Eigg Box residency.

I was concerned about doing hacks with the islanders where there was no way for them to maintain the site afterwards, and also where there was the danger of things “falling off the internet” should someone leave the island or no longer be involved in the history society. That’s a common issue and sites can die unless there’s someone to maintain them.

A good way to tackle that is to do things in the open in some kind of public way.

The thought was a Github for History, where histories are git repos, replicable and editable by others.

Spinto was a great little service that provided a web front end to a Jekyll site and let people edit the pages using a web editor, but crucially, each edit was a git commit. So you got the best of both worlds - a database of “tracked changes”, a good way to package up all the assets (images, text) and a simple way for novices to edit pages.

Taking all this thinking, we made a site for Croft 6, a croft on the island that was left abandoned by its owner, and maintained as a “time capsule” of island life. Fascinating place, so I photographed each room, and built a tiny site using Spinto. Camille, one of the islanders, was adding all the text descriptions and historical images, and feedback from her was “it’s very easy to use”.