First Steps to Design

When we launched this website back in 2024, it wasn’t more than just a blog: indeed, as a project that embraces ‘open social scholarship’ we wanted to begin by sharing our thinking openly, and to follow the development of the project in this space. The website was built in the Eleventy (11ty) static-site generator, and it was pretty minimal at first. Over the past two years we’ve built the site out considerably: developing a whole new content section to represent the books in the Wosk-McDonald collection, as well as more features for scholarship and reflection around the collection and our work.

Now that the Collection’s book metadata is coming together and the digital facsimiles of the books are accessible via our IIIF viewer, it’s time to make this website look less like a blog and more like a showcase for the Collection. So we’ve recently made a bunch of changes in that direction. For a start, the homepage of the site features the list of books in the collection: this is the whole point of the site, so we can put that up front. The “Project (B)log” is still here, but in its own section.

We’ve added a new section called “Learn” that will feature scholarship and reflections on the collection and the project. We’re leading with a set of short essays contributed by various friends of the project back in 2015, when we built the initial prototype for this project. This section will also contain publications and a bibliography shortly too.

We’ve begun to work on making the collection easier to navigate, too. Based on the rich metadata we’ve gathered, it’s pretty easy to slice and dice the list of books along such lines as language and format – you’ll see those featured – and there will be more to come. The individual book pages are now beginning to show descriptive text alongside the metadata: we want to help our readers understand what these books are and why Aldus published them – as well as pointing out what we find most interesting about them.

The fine-tuning of these design decisions will proceed over the coming weeks: we’ve made some organizational changes, and now as we work with the site we’ll be fine tuning the design and typography to suit those changes.

Implementation notes

The Eleventy site generator is pretty easy to work with. It supports a couple of different templating systems that govern how the raw material of the website (in images, markdown text, and YAML data) are assembled into web pages; we’re using liquid templates, a pretty well-known system across different web publishing systems.

Using a template, we can generate a list of books, for instance (or blog posts; it’s the same process), by pointing it at a folder full of files – each one containing metadata. For each file in the folder, we can display metadata about that file: the title, author, date, and a link to it (in the case of blog posts), or titles authors and publication years for the book files. We can also insert a filter into that template that separates things out by categories, or by language, or format. Eleventy also allows us to manage templates in a modular fashion, so that there’s one bit of template code that can be used in a number of different places.

That much is simple; the more interesting parts are the details of how we treat bits of information: for instance, writing some HTML code in the templates to handle Greek vs Latin titles differently. There will be a lot more of that kind of detail work in the coming months, as we fine-tune how exactly we want this to work.