A living timeline
Sourced stories connect the village’s distant past with more recent changes, while making uncertainty and context visible.
Community archive · Beta testing
Beta testing
Ħad-Dingli
A village memory, built together.
A bilingual living archive for Ħad-Dingli, bringing local history, photographs, places and residents’ contributions into one carefully moderated community space.
Visit the Ħad-Dingli beta (opens in a new tab)
- My role
- Product direction, research structure, design, development, moderation workflow and ongoing administration.
- Who it serves
- Residents, former residents, families, researchers and anyone with a connection to Ħad-Dingli.
- Project scope
- Local history, community photographs, stories, discussions, place-based memories and moderated public contributions.
The need
Keep a village’s memory useful, open and trustworthy.
Local history is scattered across books, public records, family albums and people’s memories. The challenge was to create a place where these fragments can meet without presenting every recollection as established fact or allowing an open contribution system to become unmanageable.
The approach
Invite participation. Protect the record.
The site separates researched material from community contributions, keeps sources and credits visible, and sends public submissions through review before publication. Maltese leads the experience, with English available so the archive remains open to people whose connection to the village reaches beyond language or geography.
Community contributions
Residents can submit memories, photographs, ideas, discussions and requests to identify people or places.
A photographic archive
Dates, locations, names and credits travel with each image so that its meaning is not lost over time.
Places with stories
A deliberately optional OpenStreetMap view links selected locations with the memories and articles attached to them.
Before & today
Paired photographs and a comparison slider make changes to familiar places easier to see.
Review before publication
New material and comments enter a moderation queue. They can be approved or declined, while other people’s words are never silently rewritten.
My contribution
From the idea to everyday use.
I shaped the concept around a simple question: how can a community website preserve memory while still feeling alive? I designed the public experience, organised the historical and community material, built the contribution journey and created the private tools needed to review submissions responsibly.
- Keep Maltese at the centre while offering a complete English route.
- Distinguish sourced history from personal recollection and clearly credit photographs.
- Ask for consent and supporting details when people contribute material.
- Approve or decline community submissions without editing another person’s account.
Under the hood
A brief technical view.
The public archive and the private editorial workflow are part of the same server-rendered application, built so that new material can be collected without publishing it automatically.
Application
A React and Vinext interface delivered through a Cloudflare Worker, with responsive layouts and keyboard-accessible controls.
Structured records
Cloudflare D1 stores stories, comments, publication status, language versions and the moderation record.
Photographs
Cloudflare R2 stores uploaded images separately from the database, including paired before-and-today photographs.
Identity & moderation
Signed-in contributions enter a private dashboard. The owner can approve or reject public material; contributors can see the status of their own submissions.
Practical safeguards
The workflow includes consent checks, source fields, file and text limits, input validation and rate limits. Private feedback remains private.
The bigger picture
Service that can become sustainable.
I build projects like this because I enjoy being of service and turning a real community need into something practical. The wider ambition is to keep improving that ability until useful digital work can also provide an additional source of income—through sustainable products and paid projects that retain the same care, honesty and public value.
The outcome
Practical value. A clear purpose.
The beta is a working foundation rather than a finished archive. It already brings together research, photographs, maps, community participation and editorial control; testing will show where the experience needs to become clearer, simpler or more useful before the archive grows.
Visit the Ħad-Dingli beta