Day 1 - The Content Model
That's me in the corner, content modelling myself
Published in Infinite Content on 8/5/2024
I have two goals for Day 1: brush off a sketch of a conceptual content model and get it roughed out in Sanity.
Structuring Sean
I typically create content models by starting with broad brush strokes, which is all well and good when thinking about content marketing goals, music apps, or event sites, but gets a bit meta when answering the question, Just who is Sean?
Conceptually, Sean …
- Has “Thoughts” on various things, that we can post online for others to read (or ignore)
- These are written by Sean (but maybe a Sean wearing a certain hat, e.g. "role")
- Thoughts can be organized in “Notebooks”
- A curated collection of Thoughts on certain topics or ideas–Content, Doodling, This Design Sprint etc.
- Collects “Bookmarks”: ideas and insights from others, whether books I’ve read, articles that inspire, quotes, etc.
- Has “Roles”
- Content Engineer vs Product Manager vs People Leader vs Kansan vs Board Game Designer vs Sometimes Doodler
- Which might be tied to "Jobs" that define a "Career"
- Sometimes “Doodles”
- Plays “Board Games”
For the sake of this design sprint, we'll focus on "Thoughts" as a type of article or blog post; implement Roles as "Author," with just a single Sean for now; and stand up rough structures for categorization, bookmarks, and notebooks. The rest we'll shovel into the later pile.
(I'd be remiss not giving some shout-outs to a few folks who've informed my approach to content modelling, from Karen McGrane and Jeff Eaton at Autogram, to Cleve Gibbon's Content Modeling Series, to Carrie Hane and Mike Atherton who wrote Designing Connected Content.)
From Concept to Reality
I'm a "Knows enough to be dangerous (and break terminal)" level programmer, I'll be following Sanity's "Day 1 with Sanity Studio" course. I'm choosing Sanity as a CMS as its schema-first approach puts structure front and center. Ever since first designing a Content API, I've found it easier to look at content as structured data, and Sanity's schema files make it easy to define content relatively seamlessly and flexibly.
At the end of the day, I have a roughed out content model - with Thought, Author, Bookmark, Notebook, and Topic types. I still have some more to finalize though - some attributes are missing, and I need to figure out how to include in-line images in the body field (hopefully without messing up the current entires...).