Decide on the core features, nice-to-haves, and luxuries

[MaggieAppleton]

What's absolutely essential – you couldn't use Arbour without it?

What can we save for future versions?

Break core features down into which ones we should implement first, second, etc.

[MaggieAppleton]

Core features

Backlinks and forward links
Visible links to all posts that link to this post, or are linked from this post
We don't need to know if a link is back or forward

Explorable information architecture

Simple, clear design and readable typography

Flat URLs (garden.com/thing, not garden.com/posts/thing)
URL taken from filename

Image optimisation

Rich metadata
Type
Growth stage
Collections/tags
Start date
Last updated date
Confidence?
Importance?
Assumed audience?

Pre-defined types
Length changes how they're shown and previewed
Macro
Essays
Notes
Conference Talks
Micro
Micropost / twoot (280 characters)
Books
Questions
Zettles/beliefs/claims

Able to reference other microposts / macroposts inline and see either full content or short preview (embedding other posts in your current post)
These are fancy links
Preview cards

Nice to have features

Support for lots of different media types – images, video, tweets, audio, sketches, code snippets

Collection pages
All posts of X type with tag Y
"Show me all notes related to gardening"

Version history on posts
List of previous versions in sidebar
Be able to view previous versions
Use redirects to always send people to the latest version from simple urls. E.g. name.com/ideas -> name.com/ideas/v0
Canonical url always links to first version
Doesn't go to the latest version
On the first version we have a clear signpost telling them there's a more recent version
Can link to a specific version
name.com/ideas/v2
Have a flag in settings that lets you set whether canonical link goes to first version or latest version
Implementation
If a new version is added, add a redirect.

Popover previews on links
Title, content preview, image preview, link count

Selective RSS publishing

Handy components for writing
Two and three columns
Quotes
Table of Contents
Code snippets
Summary box / one-liner at the top
References
Images with flexible layout and sizing
Sidenotes / Footnotes
Proper references to source material (academic papers, books, links, etc) – more hidden, smaller, less obvious than sidenotes/footnotes
Bibliography / Further reading and references

Good SEO

Search

Automatic published and last updated dates

Default page set: library, anti-library, now, uses, about

Accessible documentation for people who have never done web development before

Natural, woody themes
All themes are natural neutral colours. Forest-like. Stick to the vibe.
Dark green. Cool grey with white accents in the foreground. Warm light neutrals with brown accents (sand and wood). Maybe with green highlight accents

Luxury features

Language models as helpers or core features
Probably better to tell people to just write in VS code and pay for Github Copilot?

Visual navigation of all content mapped with semantic relationships using LM embeddings

Multiplayer cursor presence (pointless fun)

Disable language models from scraping the site
We could always set our robots.txt file to prevent being scraped, but I assume that also murders SEO. This might be a feature rather than a bug for some people.
"The robots.txt file acts as a way for website owners to control which parts of their site can be crawled by search engine bots and other automated systems."

OpenAI have provided a way for you to block the GPTBot crawler from scraping your site: https://platform.openai.com/docs/gptbot

Webmentions comments and likes

POSSE syndication to Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, etc. with Brid.gy

Webrings
Blog roll, people you recommend

Documentation on how to design your own content types and their constraints

Historical trails / breadcrumbs
You can see a trail of which posts you’ve already looked at. Like Andy’s trail of notes, but more subtle. Maybe as dots in the top left / centre top / left docked.
Allows you to explore without worrying you’re going to lose what you’ve previously seen. Lower risk of loss.

Theme adjusts based on reader's current time
We’re not having some dumb light/dark toggle. It shifts from daylight to twilight to dusk to night slowly. Soft gradients. Matches the users time zone. Owner controls it, not the reader.
Although doing this makes images tricky - transparent PNGs could become hard to see.