We talk about HTML, what it is, what its limitations are and we cover some actual HTML code that makes up the intro to HTML example website.

We learn about CSS, classes and how we can use CSS to make our website look nicer.

This video provides an introduction to JavaScript, what it is and how we could use it to add behaviors and functions to our site.

We explain what Node.js is, how web servers work and the types of things you can use Node.js for in your own apps.

How to Make a Website

The Internet is a powerful tool for uniting people around an important cause. But sometimes finding the quickest or easiest way to get a website online or even gather emails for a mailing list can be a daunting task. Let Glitch take your civic organizing efforts to the next level! Here’s a look at a few helpful and useful apps that you can remix and modify to fit your needs.

Email has its pros and cons, but it is still an effective and easy way to reach an audience. We like MailChimp as an email service provider for its ease of use, and we’ve made a starter app that will allow you to collect emails, and automatically subscribe people to a MailChimp list! Sign up for a free MailChimp account, follow the steps listed in this project’s README.md, and you’ll be ready to send emails to your supporters in a matter of minutes. Remix this app and customize it for your mission or cause!

Do you need to collect emails using an online form, but don’t have an email service provider yet? Or do you use a different email service provider besides MailChimp? Don’t fret — here’s where remixing apps on Glitch comes in handy. Software developer Lauren Dorman remixed our MailChimp Starter app and created a Google Sheets Starter, which stores emails and names in a handy spreadsheet. From here, you can download the data as a .csv file and upload it to any email service provider out there. All you need is a Google account, and you’re ready to roll!

The team at Campaign Zero is dedicated to helping people take direct action to end police violence. We’ve brought their homepage widget to Glitch for easy embedding onto any website. Just enter your address, and you’ll find your elected officials at the local, state and federal levels, as well as their positions on key criminal justice reform policies. Email and telephone numbers for these elected officials are also shown, which is useful if you want to take your advocacy efforts further. Remix the app and customize it to your liking!

Even if you need to create a simple landing page, you can make it happen on Glitch. Take a look at Tech Forward, a Glitch-powered website with dozens of links to tech-focused advocacy organizations and nonprofits working for social change. You can remix this to show a list of endorsements, or display companies that support your cause.

We’ve included links to these apps and more on our Peoples Response page. Get started today and make something great to help make a difference. It’s time to take action!

We The People: Using Glitch for Activism

Many products start as an itch that we need to scratch - a frustration or problem we’d like to see removed from our lives. You see this reflected in the overwhelming number of To-do list apps that clutter App Directories across the web and mobile. Their creator’s current solution had some limitation and so they set out to solve it.

But there are many ways to develop a To-do list app, or any type of product for that matter. We suggest a key way you can help ensure the success of that product development effort is by starting not just with the problem to be solved, but a short list of product principles that guide and inform the effort along the way.

When development of Trello began, the team discussed not just what they wanted to build, but what it meant and what the product needed to be. They came up with a few things:

It was going to be free. The idea was to get 100M people using it, and monetize by selling some aspect of it to 1% of the user base.

It was going to run anywhere — on mobile, desktops, tablets, TVs, wherever.

It had to update in real-time. Whenever anything changed that change would be visible everywhere without reloading.

It would never ask for confirmation. So, no ‘are you sure?’ pop-ups.

And these simple product principles informed all future decisions. By knowing it would be free, they knew how they had to approach building it — it couldn’t be a niche thing, used by just developers, or project managers. It had to be intelligible to a mainstream market.

It informed the features they built — if a user suggested adding velocity points to cards. Ding. No. Most folks wouldn’t know what the hell those were.

It also told them how they should tackle marketing it — reaching a few thousand people wasn’t going to cut it, it had to get in front of millions.

And they referred back to these principles as they continued to develop it, even years later.

We did similar when starting out with Glitch during a Creek Week, coming up with these principles:

It had to be the fastest, easiest way to get your own web app up and running on the web. We’d do this by abstracting away the boring, hard-to-learn parts of development and provide a way for people to write an app and deploy it to a URL instantly.

It needed to provide immediate, direct feedback when editing an app.

The editor had to be a fun place to be. You should always feel safe to edit your code and try things out.

It shouldn’t look slick and super-polished. We didn’t want it to look ‘designed’, rather we’d do our own thing because we hoped that meant you would too.

Knowing this upfront helped us to research and critically refine our ideas. Since we were abstracting away complexity, this meant we weren’t reinventing the wheel and so creating our own code libraries or languages was ruled out. We weren’t looking to make programming itself easier, so this wasn’t going to be some drag-and-drop no-code solution.

It also provided the line in the sand we needed to evaluate early mock-ups and prototype features. So when it came to deciding on how to create the project creation screen, that need for ease and speed meant we weren’t going to require users to make choices up-front about which specific technologies to use, common in cloud development tools. And it also lead us to auto-deploying because it meant we didn’t have to burden users with knowing how to commit code, nor task them with needing to push their code manually as we needed to show that instant feedback.

Leading with principles is a great technique, but it isn’t without its challenges. We might regard ourselves as something of a Jobsian product visionary, but when we’re just starting out we don’t have all the information we need to build the perfect product. If the product is in a new area for you, you’ll be feeling out the problem and understanding the market as you go. Even if you’ve worked in the field your product is in for years, this can just blind you to simple solutions as you can become too close to the problem to see a fresh perspective.

So how do you balance your on-going learning with your product principles? Well, getting customer feedback and iterating on the product is still a key part of the process.

This tripped up Trello early on, for example. Having decided this wasn’t a product just for developers, they took this too far and “threw the baby out with the bathwater”, ignoring almost all feedback from developers. But sometimes that feedback would prove to be right, and they realised they’d missed out on learning from the perspectives of some of their early-adopters just because they happened to be developers.

So instead of ignoring feedback from some, what they later understood they needed to do was segment the feedback they got, and make a purposeful effort to get input from a wide range of people because they were targeting a broad segment of people.

On the flip side, when we began working on Manuscript, our project management tool for software teams that was built on the engine of FogBugz, we had the feedback of thousands of existing customers to learn from that informed our product principles. But that feedback didn’t solve all our problems. Those insights were invaluable in crafting a product which fitted their needs. But despite what some people might ask for, they still really want the car, not just a faster horse — you still need that product vision. So when asked for integrations, we didn’t just create a few. We built our integrations with Glitch powering them, so we could enable customers to leverage its rapid development functionality and make the integrations we created not just free, but easily customizable too.

So there’s a balance to be found in combining your product principles with what you learn along the way. And you’ll have to make difficult calls on whether those principles were right after all. Nevertheless, the focus and clarity they give you, particularly in those crucial first weeks and months as you begin to develop your product, have proven to us to be a key step in creating successful, opinionated products that people love to use.

Principle-led Product Development

Empowering the Next Generation of Leaders — Glenn Otis Brown visits Glitch

“There’s no community organizing without community”

Anil Dash: Hi. I’m Anil Dash with the Glitch team here a Fog Creek. We are here today with our esteemed guest Glenn Otis Brown of the Obama Foundation. Welcome, Glenn.

Anil Dash: Thanks for being here. So you are the Chief Digital Officer of the Obama Foundation. I think most of us have heard of the guy that the foundation is named after. Can you tell me a little bit about what the Obama Foundation does?

Glenn Otis Brown: Sure. The Obama Foundation’s mission is to inspire and empower, and connect next generation of citizens, next generation of leaders. That basically takes the form of two main projects. One is, the Obama Presidential Centre …

Anil Dash: This is a big library in Chicago?

Anil Dash: Okay. Much bigger than a library.

Glenn Otis Brown: The library-ness of it is one component.

Glenn Otis Brown: Most former presidents have some sort of Presidential Library. This project, the Obama Presidential Center in the south side of Chicago in Jackson Park for Chicagoan’s out there, will have some element of a museum-ness and library-ness to it. But it really is a global headquarters for a leadership training programme for future citizens and leaders. That’s the other piece of the project. We’ve got our home stadium, our home base, which is going to be the Obama Presidential Center, and then there will be … And there already are, some first steps in building toward a global, national, and local network of training programmes that get people to be more active citizens. Whatever their level of experience.

Anil Dash: Within the foundation, where you talk about people becoming more active citizens. Who are the people that are doing that? Is that an ordinary teenager? Is that somebody who is a leader in business? Who do you imagine serving that way?

Glenn Otis Brown: It’s a pretty wide audience. Our digital team, we really think about our… The main organizing principle about what we’re thinking about inside the foundation as understanding the audience, and going out and figuring out where they are. Delivering all the stuff to them. Explaining the building. Explaining the training programmes. Getting their feedback. Obviously the Internet is very good at that.

Glenn Otis Brown: Those audiences are numerous. First, there’s the core audience that’s in Chicago. That is of all different age ranges. Starting with the south side, but then greater Chicago, who we want to help design what the function of the building and the grounds are going to be. What features that are going to be there on site. A basketball court. Or barbecue grills, and that sort of things.

Anil Dash: That one wasn’t so much of a stretch.

Glenn Otis Brown: That one’s not a huge stretch, but we definitely have gotten feedback on a lot of aspects of what that building’s gonna be like as part of the larger community. And then also, nationally and internationally. I think for a snapshot of what the audience looks like, though we ultimately want to reach everybody in the world, you could take a look at some of the people we gathered for the first Obama Foundation summit in Chicago in the Fall of 2017. We had a mix of up and coming leaders from overseas. Up and coming leaders from Chicago. People who had stood up or started their own social entrepreneurship programmes, or NGOs from around the United States. Rural and urban.

Really, anyone who wants to grow in their ability to engage with civil problems, civil society. Some focus on, particularly on fellowship programmes and some of our training programmes on up and coming young leaders.

“The various challenges that people have identified with the current  Internet landscape… I like to think of it as pollution that accompanies  the industry of social media”

Anil Dash: That’s really interesting. I think about… I got a chance to go to the Foundation Summit, and the conversation we had on the panel I was on, was about some of the concerns about misinformation and social media. A lot of concerns that many people have in the digital world right now. I’m curious, within your domain, since you’re Chief Digital Officer, this is your purvey, are the things like social media presence of the Foundation, things like that, under there?

Anil Dash: And then you also think about platforms? How are you reckoning with that trust issue? It seems like a very high priority for the former President. He brought it up on the David Letterman interview that he did. It seems like it’s very present.

Glenn Otis Brown: It is. We definitely have that top of mind, all the time. The various challenges that people have identified with the current Internet landscapes, social media landscape, whatever you want to call it. And the junk that comes with the good stuff about the current state of tech. I like to think of it as pollution that accompanies the industry of social media.

Glenn Otis Brown: And what can we do to counter it, or counter balance it, or manage it, or turn it back. The first place, especially because it’s a young organization, is just the fundamentals of ourselves having a positive presence online. We’re on all the different platforms. We’re publishing stuff that we think sets an example for how we want people to talk online. A lot of it is about shining a light on other people and what they’re doing.

Glenn Otis Brown: Yeah. We try and do that. That’s table stakes. That should be table stakes.

Anil Dash: That’s really interesting. We look at that too, with what we do with Glitch… It shouldn’t be a contentious thing to have a community where people code, but there are places online where they’ll yell at you about that. We can model, okay, we’re gonna try and be decent to each other and kind to each other, and generous. Maybe something good will come of it.

Glenn Otis Brown: Right. Exactly. And a lot of it has to do with just paying attention to also what’s happening in general, and then pointing out communities where people are discussing things civilly and are themselves a model. And then there’s, when we get up some speed and we hire up and we make more partnerships with different subject matter experts, there’s definitely a potential role for the Foundation to convene conversations with the big platforms or with the larger developer community on, “What can we do to make this better?”

Anil Dash: Does that mean you’re going to build a platform of your own?

Glenn Otis Brown: Wouldn’t rule it out. But that’s not currently a priority. So, we have, in a way, a platform of our own in that we have a website, we have obama.org. The same way the White House has whitehouse.gov. At the same time, we understand that we need a network of partners and we need to be on the platforms where people are. I would say that we would want to maintain enough flexibility to have our own platform of some sort. Once we figure out what’s the use-case that we can actually serve, that no-one else is serving.

Glenn Otis Brown: We don’t want to do it just to do it.

Anil Dash: Right. I think that idea of, we want to figure out the use-case, touches on one of the things we think of with… Our audience is digital creators, coders, programmers, and there was an era where people said, “Oh, there’s a problem in society. I’m gonna sprinkle some apple on it and that’ll fix it.” Or, “Sprinkle some code on it.” Turns out that’s not the issue. The issue is do you understand the problem real well, it becomes necessary to bring technology to bear for solving the problem, but it’s a tool in the tool belt, not the reason that it exists.

Anil Dash: I’m curious if you think about, as you train these new leaders, and these people are working on a new issue, it could be something very small. I want to clean up the park in my neighborhood. How do you envision helping somebody bringing technology to bear on that problem?

Glenn Otis Brown: I think one of the strong suits of the Obama Foundation is and will continue to be the ability to shine a light on things that are working out in the world. If you think about, without even us starting to code, which we do have ambitions to do. But, without us actually building anything, we could get a lot of mileage for a lot of people out of simply shining a light on things that are working well today. Say we get advice from you all, we have a technical advisory group that says, “Here are the 10 best apps or platforms to go on if you’re a young organizer or activist, or up and coming leader.” Simply, the mere act of the Foundation holding those out and saying, “Here’s a good beginners tool kit” would go a long way.

Anil Dash: That’s really interesting because there’s an optimism to that, which is almost presuming somebody out there is already trying to do the work. They might need more attention. They might need more resource. They might need more support. Somebody always cares about the issue. Somebody’s always working on it and if you can connect them with the like-minded people, there’s some potential there.

“A lot of it is about shining a light on other people and what they’re doing”

Glenn Otis Brown: I think that’s definitely true. And we spent a lot of the last year, like I said, using the Internet to listen and using events to listen. And one of the main things we heard from what gets called “civic tech land” is over and over and over again, different organizations, large and small. Civic Hall here in New York. Various projects out of universities around the world, actually, is don’t reinvent the wheel. We’re working on this. Help us connect to other people who are working on this. Help us get the word out. Please don’t come in and try and start from scratch.

Anil Dash: It’s so funny because that is part of coding culture. Open source culture. I’m going to reuse this, I’m going to remix this. I’m gonna put this to good use and I don’t need to write it from scratch.

Anil Dash: Yeah. That’s the less kind words. It’s interesting to me because you also have a deep background in understanding remix culture and intellectual property. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that? Lessons you’ve learned there.

Glenn Otis Brown: Sure. In a former life, I was a copyright and privacy information law lawyer. I worked at Creative Commons in its first three years. Creative Commons is a nonprofit that helps people, as you know quite well, share the creative works that they make on terms that they want others to use it with. It allows you to stamp a work, a photograph, or a song, our course material with freedoms that invite people to reuse it, so that it’s not all rights reserved, please clear all the following rights before using this. It actually invited uses under a some rights reserved copyright. Wikipedia is under Creative Commons licence. There are billions of photos on Flickr under Creative Commons licences. Lots of other examples.

I worked there as Executive Director, and oversaw the first rollout of the Creative Commons licences, and one of the things that’s really interesting about it, and an interesting compare and contrast to what the Obama Foundation’s doing now, totally different fields, is what I see in common is that’s … The ambition is to give people a way to participate in a problem that seems vague and global, and hard to get a grasp on. The copyright around 2000 was very ominously … There were two camps. It was you’re an anarchist and a pirate, or no, you’re a total control freak lock-down.

“Help us connect to other people who are working on this. Help us get  the word out. Please don’t come in and try and start from scratch”

Anil Dash: And it was looming on the horizon. They knew there was going to be a battle coming.

Glenn Otis Brown: You knew there was a battle coming and the vocabulary around it was unsophisticated, and there wasn’t a real obvious place to participate and what Creative Commons licences did was to say, “You two are a copyright owner. Anybody who creates anything is a copyright owner. It’s up to you to lay out what you want to be done with your creative works with this following do-it-yourself kit.” And totally, very different field, a lot of what the foundation wants to do is say, “Yeah. Okay. You’re concerned about the world. Alright. We would love to provide you a tool kit or have our friends provide you a tool kit so that you can make a difference in your own backyard.”

Anil Dash: But there’s a common thread, which is you can reuse the creative energies of others and build on it, and amplify it as opposed to starting from scratch.

Anil Dash: Start energy is really a lot more effort than the continuing and amplifying energy. It’s interesting too, because recently on Glitch, we built tools where basically, with a click, you can add an open source licence to your project, or you can add a code of conduct around how you want the community to behave. We did those really early in the development of the community based on this idea of obviously, reuse and remix is part of the platform. But also declarations of intentionality. I want to be able to say what I want people to use this for and I want to express the fact that this is something people can share. It seems like these are all on a thread, this open source culture, the Creative Commons culture, creative culture broadly, and then what sounds like the beginnings of a future activism, which is much more about being networked and learning from each other.

Glenn Otis Brown: Yeah. I think that’s right. And another thing they all have in common, is there’s some element… There’s a balance between free wheel and sharing and collaboration. An ethos. You can’t really have the free wheel and collaboration unless you have that intentionality that says, “Here’s some basic norms and guidelines we want to follow on this.”

To your point about a new activism that is networked and shares learnings, you’ll often hear the President describe this as his advances and Mrs. Obama’s advances in activism and in policy and in governance, were always built on previous lessons.

Glenn Otis Brown: They will go out of their way to make clear that they didn’t come up with the stuff on their own, that this was inspired by and built upon decades of the ones who’d come before.

Anil Dash: Right. There’s no community organizing without community.

Glenn Otis Brown: Right. Yeah. That’s a good way to put it.

Anil Dash: I think we’re gonna shift gears a little bit. We’re gonna have Jenn Schiffer our Community Engineer on Glitch, work with you on building out a very simple way for people to build a tool for their friends to sign up and volunteer with them and collaborate on solving projects in their communities. And the hope is, one, we have a little tool to build together that’s really interesting and useful, that will be open source. And remixable. But, also, it’s a starting point for people to be able to start to think about how they can apply those kinds of tools to their own problems.

Jenn Schiffer: I’m a Community Engineer on glitch.com, and after your conversation with Anil, I wanted to show you how we can build an example app based on one of the examples Anil had mentioned: clean up your local park.

Jenn Schiffer: I think that there are a lot of people who want to do good stuff like cleaning up their local neighborhood, joining in activism, and they feel like they don’t know the tech to be able to do that. With Glitch, we’re trying to lower that barrier.

Jenn Schiffer: I think the most powerful collection of knowledge that somebody can have is a mailing list of the people that can possibly help them. I wanted to build an example app where someone has a mailing list but they need a website to get it out there so they can collect more names of people that want to help them. If you go to glitch.com, and you search mailing list, there is a project example, mailchimp-starter. MailChimp is a service for creating a mailing list, and you can look up the set up for it. I’ve documented how to do so. You can view the source of it …

Glenn Otis Brown: I would first get a mail … I’m gonna walk through it because I’m actually not … I’m fake technical. I’m not actually technical so I might be a good sample set for this. First have a MailChimp account, go sign up for that, then come here, and follow these instructions to be able to customize it.

Jenn Schiffer: Or if you haven’t used MailChimp before, I do have links and documentation on how to go to MailChimp.

Jenn Schiffer: And create a list. For now, I actually have created a list on MailChimp, where you can … There’s no subscribers, which is sad, and I want to get this mailing list out there. MailChimp does allow you to generate embeddable sign up forms, but you need a place to embed that form. As per the set up directions in the app, I tell you how to go to the embedded forms section, and there’s a part where they give you a bunch of code, that you don’t have to update yourself. But, you do have to copy and paste it somewhere.

Jenn Schiffer: In this app, this is an app that I had created, but I’m not logged in right now. I’m just another user who wants to use it to create their own site for this. If I edit this document, a remix is made so I get my own actual copy.

“Mailing lists are great way to get started in local activism”

Jenn Schiffer: In the set up directions, it says to update index.html to include your personal content, and it gives you a line where to edit your code. I’m going to look at index.html.

Jenn Schiffer: There’s a lot of HTML. There’s a lot of stuff going on here. I added comments here that say, “This is where you put your MailChimp form.” This is the code that looks like it was given to me from the MailChimp page. I’m going to highlight that and delete it.

Now, that project was my own, but now that I’ve updated it as a not logged-in user, if you had done this, you would’ve gotten your own copy. There’s a name that’s generated. You can change it to be whatever you want it to be.

Glenn Otis Brown: That’s a saved folder of stuff that I’ve created?

Jenn Schiffer: Yes. Exactly. And then if you click show live, you see that you have a live page here. But, you don’t have the form, so that code that MailChimp had given us, we just copy and paste it …

Glenn Otis Brown: In the place where you say, to copy and paste it?

Glenn Otis Brown: Okay. And now do we need to edit this stuff to make it personalized or anything?

Jenn Schiffer: No. No. The form, you can save it as it is, and if we show live it auto-deploys it. You don’t have to learn how to get this online. You don’t have to get hosting. We do all that for you, for free. In a matter of minutes, you have your own page with your own form, that’s connected to your mailing list. If you wanted to update this, if your mission is to not help clear up your local park, but to start a chapter of a local meet up or organization, you can update the index.html content to do that.

Jenn Schiffer: For example, if your help us clear up a local park … I don’t want to say that, you can go to this code and you can find where it says that.

Glenn Otis Brown: If I wanted to put help us clean up Jackson Park.

Glenn Otis Brown: Not that it needs clean up, but this is a hypothetical.

Jenn Schiffer: There you go. It’s automatically updated.

Glenn Otis Brown: Cool. I like the salmon color, and it matches the Glitch logo well. Is there a way to customize this to where I can make it …

Jenn Schiffer: For sure. In the readme file, which has all the directions for how to use this app, I do say, if you don’t like the color, sizes, or other visual elements, you can update styles.css. CSS is cascading style sheets. It’s a language for setting rules for how the page should look. This is where all the colors and sizes are. In the readme file I explain that if you want to update the colors, sizes, you can go to the styles.css file, which is here on the sidebar, underneath index.html, and CSS is cascading style sheets.

It’s a way to set rules for how the page looks. When you look at the index.html and you decided that you wanted to change the color of that, or in your example, the form. You don’t want that salmon color. We can look in the styles.css file, and we see there’s a selector for form.

Jenn Schiffer: This is probably where we want to change the color. Here we have it set …

Jenn Schiffer: The background at coral. You can pick a different color. The color values in CSS can be color names, there’s a set collection of HTML names. Coral happens to be one. And then also there are hex values, and RGB, or red, green, blue values.

Glenn Otis Brown: Got it. Okay. I would look up the code for that? Or look up what the standardized names are?

Jenn Schiffer: Let’s look for our color. This is the most important part honestly, of getting your page out there. Is personalizing, making it right.

Glenn Otis Brown: How about light green, there? That looks good.

Jenn Schiffer: Let’s type in light green.

Glenn Otis Brown: That’s close to the green we use at the Obama Foundation, among many others.

Jenn Schiffer: Light green. There you go.

Jenn Schiffer: Yeah. In a matter of minutes you have this embeddable form, people will be able to add to your mailing list. The great thing about using a mailing list, as opposed to collecting info on a whole bunch of different platforms, is that it’s one location, and also services like MailChimp allow you to export your contacts. You don’t have to worry about the service going away. Email has been around for a really long time, and much to the chagrin of many, it will probably be around for a lot more. Mailing lists are great way to get started in local activism.

That’s the message that sits at the top of the Content Calendar Trello board we use to manage our content marketing work. It’s a recent addition, and it’s interesting to me because it speaks to the expectation Trello has about how people will use their product.

They could have chosen to handle this situation in various ways. Re-work the product to be able to handle more cards, put in place limits on the number of cards that you can add to a board etc. But this choice is a good one — it signals that we’re using the product in a way it wasn’t designed to handle, it tells us what the impact of that is, and it lets us know how we could fix it.

But this post isn’t about UX, it’s about using Manuscript and Trello together. And what that warning message makes me think about is the importance of using the right tool for the job.

Using the right tool for the job goes to the heart of our philosophy, both within Fog Creek and behind our product, Manuscript. Following the sale of Trello (which we invented) to Atlassian (the makers of Jira), some companies may have switched tools away from the “competition”, but we didn’t. We don’t think of Trello as a competitor at all, but rather as a tool that can be complementary to Manuscript. We of course use Manuscript for our software development efforts, as we think it’s the best way for software teams to manage projects. But Trello works well for our use-case in marketing, and so we still use it.

We think our customers should do the same — use whichever tool you think works best for you to get a job done. And that’s why Manuscript integrates with Trello.

In my experience, Trello works really well for organizing small projects with tens of cards. But if a project is comprised of hundreds or even thousands of cards, it works less well as their own warning message highlights.

Thankfully, for those situations there’s Manuscript. Manuscript’s case page view and powerful search facility makes working with many tasks on complex projects manageable. And our Manuscript Power-up for Trello makes working with both systems easier.

With the Power-up, you can see the status of Manuscript cases right on cards in Trello. It enables you to attach Manuscript cases to Trello cards. You can search your Manuscript cases from within Trello, and once added to a card you can see the status of a Manuscript case, with all the information you need — like who it’s assigned to, and when it was created. From the board view, you can also see which Trello cards have Manuscript cases attached.

It’s a great option for those of us who work with multiple teams, but who want to be able to use the tool that’s right for them at the time. It provides an essential hook between the two products, making navigating between cards in Trello and cases in Manuscript possible with just one click.

We’d rather empower people to use the software they want to use, rather than having to use something else. We see this all the time with teams who are forced to use a suite of tools, rather than a best of breed option. This can have a negative impact on both morale and productivity. So while Manuscript provides project management, issue tracking, and support functionality, we still provide robust integrations for other tools, like Slack, GitHub and Google Docs. And they’re all free to use, and fully customizable.

Learn more about Manuscript and begin a trial today.

“This board may be slow because there are lots of open cards”

We don’t even have to read the news to know that there are a lot of huge issues facing society today — we can just wait and the bad news will get pushed to us as alerts on our devices. In a time of so much stress and contentiousness, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

Yet time and again, if we look to those who are actually doing the work of trying to take on society’s most complex problems, they say that they wish they could team up with people who have the knowledge of how to create technology.

This week on Glitch, we’re featuring the tools and technologies that coders can use to be of service to the movements that are working to take direct action in helping people in need, all across society. We’re thrilled that people have used Glitch for activism and organizing, right from the start.

To dig into the new wave of civic tech projects, we’re featuring a new series of interviews, apps and articles all aimed at showing the breadth of what’s possible — from getting the right information to the right people, to building networks of committed community members who’ll organize around the causes they care about.

And once you see what they’re creating, we’re sure you’ll be inspired to remix their work and begin solving problems in your own community, and go on to inspire others in exactly the same way.

This Week on Glitch: Taking Action With Your Tech Skills

Exploring the Human Side of Data — A Creator Interview with Jer Thorp

Jenn Schiffer: I’m Jenn Schiffer. I’m the Community Engineer for Glitch.com at Fog Creek. Glitch is the community where you build the app of your dreams, and today, we are going to be talking to one of our community users, Jer Thorp. Hey Jer.

Jenn Schiffer: So you are Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress.

Jer Thorp: Well, I like have a lot of rotating hats. I mean … they’re not actually rotating hats though, that would be good if they were, but I teach at a programme called ITP, which people may be familiar with at NYU. It’s a new media arts masters programme.

I am a National Geographic Fellow, so that involves all kinds of things. Sometimes with vigorous animals in vigorous places and I also have an art practise that I’ve had for a long time, which involves making art; the things about the boundaries between data and culture.

Jenn Schiffer: So Innovator-in-Residence is a very interesting title, especially with an organisation like the Library of Congress. What are you doing there?

Jer Thorp: That’s a great question and I’m not actually sure yet. So I guess the residency is a research residency, so it is literally the point of the residency is kind of trying to figure out what I’m gonna be doing there, but that time is coming pretty close. My residency ends in March, so now I’m really trying to think about what the end result of the project will be.

But in general, the library asked me to come and work there and kind of think about what is the changing role of the library in the sort of face of our new digital culture. The question that I’m most interested in is what was the data that the library holds? How can that information be useful, not only to like rarefied digital humanities scholars, but also to artists and to the general public, and so can we activate that huge, huge amount of data that sits underneath the library, can we make that a public resource?

Jenn Schiffer: Well so it seems like the Library of Congress has a lot of data available-

Jenn Schiffer: You’ve built some Glitch apps using it, what data is there?

Jer Thorp: Well there’s a lot. So the library holds about 165 million items. Not all those items are catalogue usually because they’re kind of strange things, so the largest amount of objects in the library is held by the manuscript’s department. So a manuscript … if you or I died, we could donate our kind of papers to the library and that might include things like journals, but it could also include like the contents of your pocket, and just like weird things. So the manuscript’s division is kind of filled with that.

Then we have books and maps, and so on and so on, which are relatively well catalogued. About 10% of those are digitised. So if we think about the library’s data holdings, we have all the information about the catalogue, so you or I or a member of the public could download … there’s 25 million records, and then there’s all that digital information, so there’s lot of digitised photographs, tonnes of digitised maps. There’s lot of digitised sound and video, so there’s all kinds of things that are available, to pretty much anybody, more or less than the website.

Jenn Schiffer: The large part of content that I personally consume is digital. Is the Library of Congress adapting to archiving digital content?

Jer Thorp: Sure. Yeah. I mean I’ll put a big caveat on all this, that is like I am by no means an expert at all these things. I’ve had a chance to kind of purposely spread it as widely as I can across the library, so I know a little bit about a lot of little things in the library.

The library has an extensive web archive project, which archives kind of a curated set of websites. This works very similarly to how the library might collect books, so somebody who’s the curator of Serbian studies might recommend that certain books, which are important to that particular field be accepted into the bunch of the data collected. That process is called accession. So with web archive, it’s websites, so you know similar to the library’s main function, first of all, it archives all of the Congress peoples’ websites, but then it has been archiving for quite a long time now; websites that I believe have cultural value.

“How can that information be useful, not only to like rarefied digital  humanities scholars, but also to artists and to the general public”

A good example of that is a fairly new project, to archive web comics, so there’s … I forget the number, somewhere around 50 web comics that are now being archived by the Library of Congress, and that’s kind of a pilot project to understand how this type of material could be collected. Very famously, Twitter, the Twitter archives has been collected by the Library of Congress up to about now, when they’re going to stop collecting it as a whole. So there is this sort of thinking about how do you archive something like that? But there’s also a little bit of tension between what the library does and maybe what you know a company like Google does, when they’re trying to archive the entirety of the web.

That was never the idea of the library though. I’m pretty certain the idea was never to just archive everything. The library does not collect every book. It collects books that are supposed to be important to researchers and to culture in general.

Jenn Schiffer: I noticed that you’ve made a couple of projects using Library of Congress data on Glitch. How did you discover Glitch?

Jer Thorp: That’s certainly a good question. I don’t really know. I mean I follow Anil on Twitter, so that could’ve been where it came from that I also have a real interest in coding platforms that are more accessible to particularly to other non-coders or beginner coders. I’ve been involved in the Processing community for a really long time, and the Processing tool is a tool that I really love and it’s certainly a liberation and p5.js is something I’ve really been a supporter of. So I checked it out when it first came out and I was really intrigued by it and then when I started at the library, and I mentioned this before, I wanted to be as public as I could with the work that I was doing, so I thought that Glitch offered a really nice platform to A: share the work that I was doing, but to, B: make it remixable.

I was always going to release the thing and do again have a repository, but that’s only useful to people who know how to use GitHub, who know how to-

Jer Thorp: Yeah, to know how to deploy node or whatever that he says, so this was a really nice middle ground, and so now, I do all three, so it’s like I’m sharing the thing, I have a Glitch page for the projects, and then I have a GitHub repository work, so that’s sort of anybody along the way.

The work is that I’ve published thus far is like purposely really sketchy in all kinds of ways and I’ve been trying to think less about like try not to be precious about it, and I think that’s also a nice thing that Glitch does, being able to remix things and branch them off and try something that doesn’t work or does work.

Jenn Schiffer: I think the interesting thing about not having to worry about devops stuff is being okay with like a ephemerality and like being okay with putting something out there that you might take down because you realise it doesn’t work exactly the way you want it to, but also I guess, from the standpoint of somebody working as an Innovator-in-Residence. Its like you want more people to know what is coming out of the Library of Congress.

Jenn Schiffer: So what about the apps that you’ve made is one that uses like, I think it’s called Library of Names, is a project. Do you want to talk about what that app does or what you’re-

Jer Thorp: Yeah sure. So names have always been something in data that I’ve been attracted to. Partly because they read as really human things, so it’s hard for us to read a name without imagining who that person is. We kind of … our brains just do it. If I read you another piece, so I’m looking at these 25 million records, which are largely about the books that the library holds, so I’m looking at a record about a book. I can read you the title of the book and it might do something for you, like you might be kind of intrigued by it. I could tell you the year it was published. I could tell you the format, like how many pages it is, things like who the publisher was. All those things are interesting, but they don’t do that cognitive spark that a name does. As soon as I say a name, you’re like, “Oh, I can sort of imagine who that person is.”

So I went through those records and extracted all the names out of them and looked a little bit about how names change over time, so the library holds things that go back you know into the 16th century, and further back than that, and then they have things that were published last year. And so you can sort of see that the first project was if I were to randomly pick a group of authors from the 1800s, what would their names be? And I wrote if I were to randomly pick an author from now, what would their names be? And what might speaking those names or reading those names teach us about what type of people were writing books back then? That’s the first thing, but also, what was the library collecting?

Because of course, the library is making political decisions about what type of material they are collecting, and those decisions are being made by curators who have very specific academic backgrounds and so you see some of that reflected in the data.

It’s a small-scale project that it was never meant to be kind of a deep analysis of name frequency, but more of an evocative thing.

Jenn Schiffer: Well so, I have your Library of Congress MARC names project that we talked about up here. I’m gonna remix it so I can edit it. So what’s going on here?

Jer Thorp: Yes, so this is the list of names that we talked about before, so there’s a little bit of text to sort of walk you through. The imaginary idea of thinking about what authors in this case from 1775 might look like and then we see 20 of them listed on the screen. So what’s happening in the background is that it’s going through all of the names and randomly picking a set of them, so this is like a random sampling.

The sketch is kind of built in, in a few parts. There’s the HTML page, which shows the actual thing. There’s a p5.js sketch, which does some of the logic about fading in the names and showing you the particular names, and then there’s the data itself. If you look in the assets, you’ll see there’s a couple of files here. There’s the names file and that’s the main one, where you can see all the first names.

“It’s hard for us to read a name without imagining who that person is”

Then there’s the totals file, which actually gives you a year-by-year total of all the names, so that you can normalise against it. It’s not really important for this particular example, but if you’re thinking about ways to use this data, that could be cool too.

Then they also have a last names one in here. The last names one, I actually never tried, but I’m sure it works, but if someone’s looking for a fun thing to do and switch this thing to the last names, it should be pretty easy to do.

Let’s go to the sketch.js and I’ll show you something really simple. So I told you before that there are 20 names being shown, but if you want to see many more, we can change this first number at the top, the display num from 20 to 50, and then once that updates, we should be able to go and see, yep, there’s 50 names. Switch to maybe 1990 or something around there, and so this is the same list from 1990, and we can really see the much broader diversity of names that come at 1990, but still, a lot of names repeating themselves; Peter, and Carlos, and Victor, and-

Jenn Schiffer: Oh, it’s so interesting. Then like names from people who have Asian names in there.

Jer Thorp: Yeah, and you’ll see that more and more as you go further up with that.

Jenn Schiffer: Awesome. So you’re using p5 for this, which I see. Let’s take a look at package.json, you have a dependency of p5.

Jenn Schiffer: You’ve worked a lot with p5.

Jer Thorp: Yeah, it’s great and you know I think p5, the thing that I like the most about it is it’s actually not even the thing itself, it’s the community they’ve built around it. They have this really amazing community, which is you know I think Lauren McCarthy, who has run a lot of the development on p5, has really described it as a community that’s kind of built on people being nice to each other first, and then code afterwards, so it’s a nice sort of change, if people have maybe tried in the past of getting into an open-source community and then turned off by it. This is a really good place to get into it.

Jenn Schiffer: So it’s sort of a small set of data that matches names, but like it can tell a huge story about history and those people choices, which is really cool.

Jer Thorp: Yeah, this is sort of, was inspired really in a big way by a project that I and two collaborators, Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, did at the Museum of Modern Art, five years ago, I guess. We did a residency there and as part of that residency, we did a performance with a theatre group called The Elevator Repair Service. One part of our performance was we actually a weeding of the most popular names for artists in the collection, starting with the most popular and then going all the way down. The first 29 of them are Ben, and then you get Mary, and then … And we sort of staged that as a performance.

One of the things that I realised then, which was I was really carrying into this piece is what I’m trying to encourage the user to do, is to read those names. You know maybe not read them out loud, but at least hear the voice in your head. It does transform it into a crowd and you can see faces, and so, that’s what I wanted to get people to think about. It’s a good critical skill too. It’s like if you look at a list of authors on a paper or speakers on a panel, like to be able to sort of close your eyes and imagine what those people look like and see what gives you a chance to be critical about what they may be talking about or where their biases lie, so on and so on.

Jenn Schiffer: What API was used for that? Is there supposed to be like an end-point?

Jer Thorp: Yeah, so that’s not an API. The library, two years ago, a year and a half ago, I don’t know exactly, they’ve done a public release of what are called their MARC records. MARC is one of the acronyms that’s not really exact, it’s Machine Readable Cataloguing Records, so MARC records. MARC records are a really interesting story actually.

They were developed by one of the first computer programmers, her name was Henriette Avram. She went to the library, was tasked with solving this new problem that they knew they wanted to do, which was put the records of the library in the computer. Before then, they were in card catalogues. She would still visit the card catalogues in the library. They’re huge, like millions and millions of cards. So she developed this system, MARC, this format MARC, which allowed for a mechanism in a series of algorithms to digitise all their records. I think I’ll get the year wrong … I think it was 1959, still being used today, MARC version 21.

So the MARC records are available for public download.

p5.js has “a community that’s kind of built on people being nice to each other first, and then code afterwards”

Jer Thorp: Well, the native file format is this original MARC format and so it’s kind of, more or less, weird, free-text code, but they also publish it in XML, so the XML is what I’m parsing in the background of those Glitch experiments, I’m doing the heavy lifting, also using a series of node apps to parse those into data sets that are sort of digestible. So if you go to any of the Glitch experiments that I’ve done in the Assets folder, you’ll find those processed files.If you want to see how they were processed, you go to my GitHub repository, that’s github.com/blprnt/loc and you can find all of the code to do the heavy lifting, to process those 25 million records, you know to do forwarding some analysis on them; it could take hours, so not a great thing for like Glitch, just hang out and wait for a few hours and then we’ll come up with some data.

Jenn Schiffer: Does the Library of Congress have plans to maybe create infrastructure where maybe they do that processing, so that developers can access an API at some point?

Jer Thorp: Yeah, so, there is sort of API-like access to the library search, which is you know is relatively similar, but when you want to process that many records, an API is never going to be the answer. You know, no one is going to make 25 million API hits, unless you wanna drive where you’re hitting their API like crazy. So zip downloads are always going to be the solution for that, and I mean that’s fine. I think sometimes us programmers … I’m guilty of this, you know, “I’ll build an API,” when it’s like, “No, I’ll just publish zip files,” and somebody can download those zip files.

But there’s a lot of thinking about how the library can be more open to certain digital humanities work through things like APIs. There’s a really good API that you can use, for example, historical newspaper records. They have a massive, massive collection of historical newspaper records that’s available. The project name is slipping my mind and that has an API that you can use, or well again, like I said, there’s kind of an API-like way to access the search.

If you wanna find out all of this stuff, there’s a group that I worked with, Library of Congress Labs. If you go to labs.loc.gov, they have a really cool site called LC for Robots, and it’ll give you lots of access to this type of information.

Jenn Schiffer: LOC now is Library of Congress, not Lines of Code.

“If you are somebody who’s interested in creative coding, it’s like the best place in the world to come”

Jenn Schiffer: I think a lot about people learning more about artists and coders out in the world, and you’re working at the Library of Congress, and you started this podcast, it’s called Artist in the Archive.

Jenn Schiffer: What do you go over in the podcast?

Jer Thorp: So the podcast, it’s kind of about two things, and one is the people that I’m meeting in the library and the other is the work that I’m doing to try to understand what I’m gonna do, so one episode involves a long interview with somebody from the library. The first two episodes we interviewed Kate Zwaard, who is the chief of the national digital initiatives there, so she does a lot of these digital projects that we were talking about before.

Then in the second episode, I interviewed John Hessler, who is a curator in the maps department and works on Meso-American maps, but he’s also a mathematician and topologist, and there’s lots of interesting conversations.

Then I’ve been asking librarians and people who work at the library what are their favourite objects, and I do short interviews with people about those objects. So we’ve had a census from I think the late 1700s; although, I may be wrong, from Connecticut, which is an early census of a small community. It’s kind of things like how many sheep they owned and if they knew were to own a clock, and so it’s really interesting data-centric look into life in early America, but then we saw a daily journal from a guy named Izzy Young, who ran a club and bookstore in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s, early 1960s, so it’s his notes about Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen, and so it’s kind of little insights.

It’s a way for me to balance the work that I’m doing, which really tends to focus on the large data dumps to these other little pieces of texture that are in the database.

Jenn Schiffer: So your residency, you said, is coming to a close soon. What’s next for you?

Jenn Schiffer: Besides more Glitch projects, I hope.

Jer Thorp: Yeah, I know, but I’m going to try to get something magical done at the library, and that’s my main focus. And then, the big thing that I’m thinking about right now is, along with all that other stuff, is a conference I helped organise in Minneapolis called The Eyeo Festival, and Eyeo, we’re releasing tickets on February 1st, and it happens in June, and that’s a lot of fun. I’m just finishing up putting together the speaker list for that, so if you are somebody who’s interested in creative coding, it’s like the best place in the world to come.

Jenn Schiffer: So you’ve got a lot going on, where can people find your work online?

Jer Thorp: Oh my. I have a really dusty website that you’re not allowed to go to. Yeah, I think the best thing is probably to follow me on Twitter, blprnt, and I post most of the stuff there. I ran a studio for a number of years that we did a lot of really cool work and you can find that work at ocr.nyc, and that encompasses most of the last six years of works that I’ve done, but I promise I am working on a new website, I’ve heard the kids say you have to have one these days.

Recent Posts