Chuck Grimmett

Good post, Tom. I agree, we need more user-friendly tools to power use cases like this.

I love when people publish open CSVs on GitHub and have an associated GitHub Pages site where that data is displayed, but that takes some technical know-how. Heck, publish a SQLite file and I’ll be happy, but the moment the database isn’t viewable on the web, you’ve lost 98% of people.

Kaggle’s open datasets and notebooks are a partial solution, but more focused on data science. I’ve discovered some cool stuff in there, though. ObservableHQ comes to mind, too. You already mentioned Datasette, which I love, and it is also worth mentioning tools like Flatfile and OpenRefine

I’m not optimistic about storing niche databases like the ones you describe in Airtable or Notion because I don’t expect them to be around long-term or keep a consistent link structure with redirects while they are around. Are.na is nice for image collection, but not super sortable/filterable/searchable.

Regarding making a database of Brooklyn Artists and keeping it up to date, if you can find 1-2 profiles they all have in common (LinkedIn, GitHub, Instagram, Dribbble, Twitter), building a tool to occasionally check for updates would be a lot easier than free-form web scraping and parsing.

For a general use case: Since WordPress is my tool of choice (I work at Automattic on the WordPress Special Projects Team), I’ll explain how I’d go about setting up a niche collection of resources on WordPress.

• I’d start with setting up a custom post type with the appropriate fields for your collection.
  • There are two ways of doing things as the WP world transitions to Gutenberg. I think the Block way (where everything is added via blocks) is the best long-term, but there really aren’t tools for setting up custom collection blocks that do this sort of thing, so right now I’d still advise people to go the Custom Post Type UI + Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) or Pods route to set up the structure without code. Leverage things like Tags and Categories as much as possible to use the built-in functionality WordPress already has for these concepts.
  • Everything gets its own permalink.
• For outputting the content, you can use core blocks like the Query Loop for much of it, or leverage some of the blocks that ACF or Pods provides.
• Need auto tagging and more powerful term management? Use TaxoPress.
• For searching and filtering, use something like ACF Better Search and Search & Filter. Jetpack Search is really great, though a bit pricey for hobby projects.