Conversation Culture Website
About the Project
Conversation culture was a Meetup Group, I used to run between the years 2020-2022.
We gathered together, usually in a bar or cafe setting to discuss various intellectual topics from politics, to philosophy, to culture.
At its peak we had over twenty regular members attending, and we were hosting a live event every week and an online event every other week.
The philosophy behind the Conversation Culture project:
Conversation Culture is the firm conviction that we can make progress through our speech. That through exchanging words and ideas, we can come to an understanding.
A part of the idea was that we would actively seek the kind of conversations that are considered taboo in polite company, such as religion and politics.
This way we could expose ourselves to different perspectives and refine our understanding.
While we had a lot of interesting and fruitful conversations on a whole range of topics, I feel like I was naive about a number of things during this time of my life and my politics and understanding of how the world works were not very well-developed.
Were I to make a discussion group today, I’d come at it from a completely different angle.
The Conversation Culture website runs on the ghost blogging platform.
I wrote this project as a ghost theme from scratch. Writing up a ghost theme is very similar to writing up a static site, but with help from the templating language handlebars which accesses information about blog posts and web pages from Ghost’s SQLite Database.
At this point I already was well versed with writing and maintaining Ghost websites thanks to my personal website.
With some help with my friend Nathan, we were able to integrate the Ghost theme with information from the Meetup Group.
By fetching information from the Meetup API, we were able to create web pages on the site from the events in the Meetup group.
It was set up, such that by posting a new event on the meetup group the website would automatically update with details about the event as well as displaying the title, date, time and location of the next event on the front page, along with a link to view more information.
This effectively reduced the marginal work required to maintain the website to zero.
I am very happy with how this website turned out.
I feel that the website is a good showcase of my ability to design websites and use CSS.
Compared to the other projects in this portfolio, this website is fancy and makes extensive use of CSS capabilities.
There’s transparency, shadows, blurring, elements changing from black-and-white to colour over hover, animated text and a carousel that rotates between a few select quotes and svg elements.
The website was also designed from the beginning with responsiveness in mind, no matter what device or screensize everything displays well.
Nowadays I prefer much simpler design, I like creating as fast, light and accessible a website as possible, ideally a static-site with no code running on client side.
However, this project shows that I can design and build more elaborate aesthetic interfaces, if required.