In the month of July, I plan to create and release one unique website per day using
PubStudio, a platform I helped develop and currently maintain. There are a few purposes to this project; improve the PubStudio editor through real use, exercise my creativity and design sense, and improve my writing and communication skills.
The first few pages will be simple and mostly static, later on I’ll try to explore some more complex sites that push the limits of PubStudio’s
WYSIWYG editor. The platform is capable of accepting user input, saving it to a database, and displaying it, but there are several missing pieces that need to be filled in before it works as expected.
Here is some of the functionality I aim to enable in the PubStudio editor over the next month:
Moderated user input - provide tools for site creators to accept user input and manually approve it for display. For example, a comment section on a blog, or a review site that accepts submissions.
Dynamic pages - Currently all pages are explicitly created in the editor. Allow pages with dynamic routes that serve content from a database table. For example, a user profile page.
Inline and external videos - Add builtin components for uploading/hosting videos, and embedding YouTube videos.
External scrips - Provide a mechanism for loading external scripts when a page is opened, or a specific component appears.
Embedded WASM - Explore ways to upload and initialize WASM modules in the site.
As a software developer I rarely get the chance to express creativity, and as a result my design abilities are somewhat uninspired. I mostly either work on purely technical projects, or translate existing designs to code. By forcing myself to come up with a unique website every day, I hope to flex the right side of my brain a bit more than usual. I’m not going to learn to produce amazing graphics or beautiful animations in a month, but by forcing myself to make something visual every day, I can at least improve my sense of layout and colors.
It’s been years since I’ve had to write anything non-technical, so blogging about each site is a good way to get back into that as well.