Prototype ready for testing

This post was written during the original Jekyll-based prototype rollout. Today the catalog is generated with Eleventy; the motivations below still broadly apply.

After many discussions and several experiments, we shared a prototype to gather feedback.

The main motivations for working on it were:

• Some users struggled to submit content while maintenance of the incumbent platform grew harder — it was time to explore alternatives after more than ten years on the honorable existing site.
• We wanted broader contribution paths: curated listings, typo fixes in prose, improving generator code — GitHub workflows and Issues should widen participation.
• Large dataset blobs are awkward on lab disks while platforms such as Zenodo supply durable archival; we emphasize the IAPR-TC11 Zenodo community.
• Serving static markup from GitHub Pages is fast and minimizes attack surface versus dynamic stacks.

The 2021 experiment picked Jekyll for simplicity and Pages integration at that time.

We hope incremental effort—done alongside ordinary research workload—helps the community surface DIAR datasets, tools and competitions more openly.

Interested? Use Feedback, open issues under TC101-demo on GitHub, or write to tc101-demo(at)googlegroups.com.