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COLOPHON
This website has been created as a Coda.io document. Originally launched as no-code app builder, Coda turns out to have some very useful — but also limited applications — as an advanced website creation tool. With little more than a click of a button, you can publish an interactive doc as a website. If you are a paid subscriber, you can use your own custom URL.
Those limitations? First, let's just say you're extremely limited in your choices of fonts and colors at the presentation level. Second, under some pretty common circumstances your users can’t access a search box.
On the other hand, it allows me to create some pretty interesting tools that I would not be able to code myself. This site currently includes two such tools — the Updates engine and the Archive database.
Updates
The updates engine is a microblogging tool that enables me to post brief bits of information from this site. It can also consume an XML feed so that it can gather content from other sites I work on. The engine powers the “Latest Updates” section of the home page and the “Updates” page itself. It’s a simple 12-field database with useful sorting and filtering capabilities.
Archives
The Archives database is more substantial, but pretty straightforward. It’s powered by Coda.io’s Google Drive pack, which watches a Google Drive folder and updates the table when a file is added or removed from the folder. The files in question are markdown files, produced in Obsidian and containing the full text of an article I’ve written. The database includes links to other Google Drive files representing images, PDFs and full page screenshots of my work. It also contains links to the article if it is still publicly accessible on the original publisher’s website. Then there’s metadata — tags, categories, published date, a summary, and information about the publisher or client. In all, about 40 attributes for each clip.
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