Thinking again about Public Bio, a Linktree-ish site builder I started working on in mid-2018. When I left it, it supported a single user and could generate a static site. I had started making progress toward multi-user support, but didn’t quite finish.
Since then, we released WriteFreely (a much larger open source project) and worked out the details of shared / standalone add-on apps for Write.as, like Submit.as. So as I’ve played around with Public Bio again, I’ve started incorporating everything I learned there. Now I’m building it with a common interface that will enable you to run it either as a standalone multi-user app, or as an add-on to a WriteFreely instance, where your users might already live.
This is exactly how Submit.as, Snap.as, and our other apps are built — as standalone Go libraries whose data can live alongside our core WriteFreely data. This way, we can turn each one on or off independently from the others, and serve them wherever we want. You can start up a single application server on its own, or incorporate it into a larger application.
This furthers my long-standing idea of “independent, but connect apps,” but will also mean that anyone else can launch their own suite of blogging, and linking, and other services, depending on what they want to offer their community.
Thoughts? Discuss...