[ckan-discuss] Idea: Mini-site creator

Mon Sep 5 19:02:34 BST 2011

On 31 August 2011 00:13, Tim McNamara <tim.mcnamara at okfn.org> wrote:
> 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.

Hi Tim,
This is a really interesting new outlet for CKAN! I can't wait to hear
how this develops.

James and David have been discussing an idea for the past couple of
months about a way to show a subset of a CKAN simply with the domain
name, and I wonder if this would be useful for your use case? So,
perhaps you go to london-riots.thedatahub.org which filters data by
that which has the tag 'london-riots'. You could even register/add
datasets at this sub-site and it would apply this tag by default.

David