Posts of Emily Smith RSSThu, 29 Jun 2023 03:29:02 GMTYesterday I wrote about why we didn't build our music community from scratch. Today, the fun part: making it look good! My developer friend and I spent the weekend restyling our event pages with Tailwind CSS, and I came away with a new appreciation for a tool I'd never heard of a month ago.Changing things while you watchTailwind is "utility-first", which in plain English means you style things with lots of small ready-made classes instead of writing custom CSS. In practice, I could say "a bit more space under the band name" and see it change straight away. We tried about six versions of the gig card in one evening.Our colours, defined onceColours, spacing, fonts and screen sizes all live in one configuration file. Our purple and the slightly loud orange we use for "sold out" are defined once and used everywhere, so nobody gets to sneak in a seventh shade of purple. (That was me. I was the one.)The same look on the website and in the appBecause Tailwind is so widely used, there are versions of it for React Native as well. The event card on the website and the event card in the app share the same styling, so members stop asking why it looks different on their phone.Phones firstPrefixes like sm, md, lg and xl change the layout by screen size. Most of our members check gig details on their phone on the way to the venue, so we designed for that first and let bigger screens catch up. There's also a big community making plugins and themes, so my friend rarely had to start from nothing.I still can't write CSS, but at least now my opinions about it are useful 😄

]]>Thu, 29 Jun 2023 03:29:02 GMTFor a long time our open mic crowd lived in about five places at once: a mailing list for gig news, a group chat that never stopped buzzing, a spreadsheet for performer slots and a shared photo album nobody could ever find. Every Monday I spent an hour copying the same information from one to the other. So when I started looking for a proper home for us, the last thing I wanted was to build one from scratch 🎶Here's why UNA ended up as the backend we went with, written by someone who plays bass, not someone who writes code.The basics were already there: profiles, an activity feed, groups, events, messaging and connections between members. That covers pretty much everything a music community needs, and none of it had to be built. I set up our first listening party event in about ten minutes. It can still look and feel like us, too. You can change the branding, switch modules on and off and, if you have a patient developer friend (I do, bless him), build custom ones. We don't need a jobs board, so it's off, and the gig calendar sits front and centre.The part that really sold me: the new web front end built with Next.js and the mobile app built with React Native both talk to the same UNA backend through its API. When I post an open mic night, it shows up on the site and in the app at the same time. Goodbye, Monday copy and paste.There's also an active community and a marketplace for extra modules and themes, and most of my questions had already been asked and answered by someone else. Regular updates and security patches mean I'm not lying awake worrying about our members' data, which leaves more energy for the actual music.If you run a community of any kind and you're drowning in tools, have a look at what you could stop building yourself. Happy to answer questions from a very non-technical point of view! 🎸

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