It's been a while since anything was mentioned about this Showboard project of mine.
First off, is it dead? After so long, and so little messaging you’d think, "yes, it is surely dead".
No! It is not dead. It is, in the loosest sense of the word, thriving.
The lack of messaging is purely because I'd rather build things than tell anybody about them. As a drastic change of pace, let me tell you the story of Showboard:
It was originally intended to be part bookmarking tool, part Pinterest clone, part curation of community content; there were so many potential directions it could have gone. As reality has set in, it has actually been used for:
- recipe sharing and some menu planning
- visual bookmarking (books and tv shows perhaps)
- reference materials (blog posts, etc)
- storing and organizing reads for later
Personally, I've curated a few boards with a selection of leadership posts and resources, programming guides and references, restaurants to visit, and a selection of recipes; all of which I regularly reference and update.
What makes a lot of this possible is a critical update I made 9 months ago: in addition to the robust editor and image management system, it now scrapes entire articles, when such a format is available. Typically when scraping links, you only get the shareable content, which is often just a short summary. Being able to scrape entire articles into an easily consumable, consistent format, is something often unavailable with the current tooling on the internet.
With this improvement and seeing how it's being used, I did a significant rewrite recently. I say "significant" significantly - everything has been rebuilt from the ground up. This feat took a couple months and forced me to only consider the most valuable aspects of Showboard. It is now focused on pulling information from links, augmenting that content however you find most valuable, and sharing with relevant contacts. It still has the image manager, tagging per post and the rich text editor.
If you haven’t visited in a while, this is what it used to look like:
And this is what it currently looks like:
The structure is similar, but there are significant differences in its presentation and functionality. One notable difference is that it now supports Dark Mode, something absolutely nobody asked for.
All in all, with this total rewrite, it has been reduced to a basic bookmarking / note taking tool, providing a personal archive and visually interesting way of presenting information you find relevant. You can still add multiple people to your boards, organize contents as you see fit, and use the powerful full-text search ... and there are many other features still being added.
As you can see, it is indeed, thriving. I just wanted to let you know about these updates and to thank you for being part of this journey so far.
You can see the latest at showboard.ca.
Please let me know what you think, if there’s anything missing or if you need any help at all. You can reach out by email here.
While you’re here, check out another project I've started in the meantime: Tendee, an attendance manager providing more control and visibility to event organizers, and all the information at a glance to everybody else. It can be used for one-off or series of events. So far, it’s been used to coordinate D&D campaigns and sports seasons. If that sounds interesting to you, feel free to try it out.