[ckan-discuss] Idea: Mini-site creator

Wed Aug 31 00:13:32 BST 2011

I've received great feedback on a proposal in the emergency & disaster
management communities. I have had an idea that will really make
things happen. However, I would like people's feedback on a thought
I've had to really maximise its usefulness.

The idea is to  to leverage the power of thedatahub.org to collect the
ad hoc spreadsheets, geodata, etc that are produced during emergency
responses. Details:
http://notebook.okfn.org/2011/08/24/adding-structure-to-ad-hoc-data-sharing-in-emergencies/.
The problem is that this requires people knowing specific tags of
events. This is not really helpful to people who have not used CKAN
before.  I've had a few requests for some micro-site would be able to
just display data for a particular event. The best response I could
come up with was, 'Well, people could build a site with the API'.
However, I would like to do better.

I would like people's feedback and assistance to create a static site
generator that basis itself on tags/searches from CKAN instances. The
application searches for particular tags, then downloads (caches) the
data for every package. It then builds a static site with an index
page and pages for each package. Almost exactly like CKAN, only
topic-specific and read only. Finally, it uploads the static HTML to
Dropbox or similar. I thought the generator could be run in the
background and checks to see if anything has changed each minute or
so.

I think this could be very useful for people who would like to create
micro-sites on particular areas, such as environmental data and so
forth.