In my previous post, I talked about how I’m trying to be more intentional and deliberate with my digital data. I don’t just want to keep everythin

Using static websites for tiny archives – alexwlchan

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2024-10-17 05:30:03

In my previous post, I talked about how I’m trying to be more intentional and deliberate with my digital data. I don’t just want to keep everything – I want to keep stuff that I’m actually going to look at again. As part of that process, I’m trying to be better about organising my files. Keeping something is pointless if I can’t find it later.

Over the last year or so, I’ve been creating static websites to browse my local archives. I’ve done this for a variety of collections, including:

I create one website per collection, each with a different design, suited to the files it describes. For example, my collection of screenshots is shown as a grid of images, my bookmarks are a series of text links, and my videos are a list with a mixture of thumbnails and text.

These websites aren’t complicated – they’re just meant to be a slightly nicer way of browsing files than I get in the macOS Finder. I can put more metadata on the page, and build my own ways to search and organise the files.