Here’s the short version: as part of my job, I come across news stories that I want to categorize by topic or tag and then share with my team. It doesn’t have to be super-slick, but I do want this to be a webpage that shows the various categories that can be expanded to show all of the links to articles that I’m sharing.
At first, I thought Obsidian or Craft. But before I build something, is there anything out there that’s more of a purpose-built tool?
I suppose I could also just make this in Wordpress.
I’m guessing that asking people to open a spreadsheet and look at a list of links is going to lose a lot of people.
This is a question I have too. As much as email is maligned(and repeatedly pronounced to be on life support), I feel like people are far more likely to look at something you send them than to go to some other place just to look at your links.
This is another way of saying, meet people where they are. If your team uses slack, publish your list of links to the relevant Slack channel they gets the most attention. If your team uses email, send a single daily or weekly email. And so on.
Whatever the case, stay respectful of the reader: give them an entry-point and then a list of links with enough info to make it clear why they might want to read it, but no more. In Slack that might mean a quick summary of some top links, and then a threaded reply with all the links (to avoid taking over a whole screen or more in the channel). In email, a very short intro and then an efficient list of links.
@timwindsor is looking for a solution for a team. I suggested what I felt was a efficient solution.
In the analog days information for a team at the Fortune 100 company where I worked was often a memo with a distribution list stapled to it. You would read it, draw a line through your name, and pass it along to the next person. Eventually it would be retuned to the sender. A cave man read receipt. Not reading information sent to you wasn’t an option.
IMO, Slack would be a reasonable solution. But email is probably the number one productivity killer in business. Some companies actually ban it for internal use. It’s always my last choice.
What is your experience with using web site tools? have you asked readers to give you examples of what they want and if so what did they say?
[for the latter i sometime found user’s expectations unrealistic, e.g. they only wanted “pretty” and/or like TV show. Do your readers control your budget in case you have to outsource to meet their expectations?]
Like I said, email’s demise has been been predicted often, and so far, prematurely. But this time could be different!
More seriously, I read the initial inquiry as seeking a way of distributing a list of links to a team – one-to-many publication.
In that case, asking people to go somewhere new or use a new tool is often a losing battle – we’ve seen posts on this forum to that effect.
Certainly for many-to-many communication email isn’t a great option. But for putting something in front of someone and asking them to take a look, it’s hard to beat – see the proliferation of email newsletters in the past few years. And that’s a business model!
But my main advice is to meet the team where they are anyway, rather than trying something new. If shared spreadsheets for groups lists is already a thing, use it!
I’ve used https://raindrop.io/ to categorize Tech Art topics for my Unity devs. Very clean, compact, and if your content fits it - can also service as a cool moodboard.
There is nothing wrong with the tools. The last email system I managed didn’t have a single non-hardware caused outage in something like fourteen years. The problem is how it is used. And people have been trying unsuccessfully to come up with a solution for decades.
Not reading information sent to you wasn’t an option.