Homenauts – Resources for explorers who stay at home during Covid-19 | Hacker News Reader

Homenauts – Resources for explorers who stay at home during Covid-19

homenauts.com

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I and five other volunteers, with backgrounds in customer relations, UI/UX design+engineering, medicine, digital design and psychology formed a team and created a website in 48 hours during the weekend: https://homenauts.com/

The goal is to inspire people who stay at home during the COVID-19 pandemic and to share tools for making the most of the time.

We did the challenge as part of the the HackCorona hackathon: https://hackcorona.world/ This was my first hackathon and it was an amazing wild ride! I had signed up for it just a couple days before the start date and only got confirmation I was to participate a few hours before kick-off. Going into it I didn’t know if I could do much to help, since I’m a psychologist with a kind of mixed bag of other skills, instead of say a straight-up data analyst or programmer. I feel incredibly lucky to have met the others, who welcomed me and found ways to make use of everyone’s skills. Coining the term “homenauts” is probably my biggest contributions - otherwise I mostly tried to do some research and write content for the website, while the other members collected content, wrote, made illustrations, built front/back-end functionality, acquired the domain... Every time I checked back in there was something new to see. Exhausted, we finished the hackathon in second place out of more than 30 teams and received a lot of positive encouragement for the idea.

We plan to continue work on this project, albeit at a less intense pace. So I and the others would love to hear what ideas you might have for the user content sections, or any other feedback! We all want the project to help our fellow homenauts as much as possible :D You are also very welcome to submit links to be added to the site if you want - in that case, check out the icon at the top right of the site.

Congrats on the launch and great idea.

Did you get any sleep ;)

What’s the tech stack?

Thanks! I actually don't know the technical details myself scratches head except that we're using WordPress (please don't judge ;) - it is very handy when some members, like me, who are less tech-savvy are contributing and it everything has to happen very fast) to edit and publish content. I asked a team member who's worked more on putting together the technical components to come in here - he'll come by a bit later today. I had had some trouble submitting the thread here at HN yesterday so when I finally managed to do so it was quite late. In retrospect, it probably would've been better to wait until morning, sorry you had to wait for a reply.

And about the sleep part, hehe well I did sleep some but it was hard to quit for the day and especially to stop all homenaut ideas from bouncing around in my head when laying in bed :P

Sorry for the long wait again uxcolumbo. This is the description I got from one of the crew members who worked with more of the technical side of things: "Because we needed speed we hosted a wordpress site with a directory plugin that we hacked into and had the functionality that we needed". Maybe it doesn't clear everything up but hope it helps :)

Small addendum: What was used was just digitalocean+wordpress, with some custom code for the posting / upvoting system (but of course gregsadetsky - see comment above - had already figured out that it was digitalocean)

(also to all posters in the thread, thanks again for all the great feedback! I'd expected people to be harsh here, but I feel very welcomed to HN)

Congrats! Small note, your custom icon font is not loading for me, making all icon images look like squares (it's the unicode character used by the font, actually). See: https://imgur.com/a/708lUBr (they're now loading again)

To support more traffic, you could look into dedicated hosting / a CDN (such as cloudflare) for your static files. As you're using Digital Ocean & WordPress, you could use Digital Ocean's CDN offer like this: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-spee...

Another option would be to use dedicated wordpress hosting (wpengine.com or any other well known one) which offers caching and a CDN service -- that could remove some of the hosting / growing concerns.

Thank you for the heads up and the tip! A team member got the same issue as you yesterday but then the icons started working again, just like it was for you. I'll pass this on to the rest of the team.

Here's one more site for staying home. WebRTP, no install, no registration. https://ba.net/screen-share-party

Thank you for sharing this link.

Thank you! If you want to submit the link to be shared at Homenauts, you can use the link at the top right on the site: https://homenauts.com/ (as you can see in the comment by panoramas4good above, you need to be on a desktop computer at the moment unfortunately) If you want me to add the link directly - because I definitely think it fits - just tell me :)

Yes add it to homenauts. Thanks.

Done! Thank you so much for creating the service and for sharing :) You can see the link here https://homenauts.com/social-contact-and-communication/ (and at the main page of course) If you want you can upvote your link there, I already did ;)

Super impressive resource for home bound and self quarantined people. It looks like remote work is going to become the new normal!

Thank You for putting together such a great list of ways for people to be productive and positive during this global crisis.

Stay healthy, happy, and productive in these uncertain times!

Thank you for the kind words! :D

Very nice, I think we can certainly use more knowledge sharing around these topics!

I definitely hear that many of my more extroverted colleagues are taking the isolation and lack of social interaction quite hard. As a more introverted person (who has done long stints of working remotely in the past), I find coping with this part less problematic. Instead, the "co-homenaut" problem is harder to deal with, as I have two young children. (In this sense, I wonder if "co-isolation" would not be a more appropriate phrase, as "isolation" doesn't quite capture it!) Are there sections of the site more focused on this aspect, or could it be made more prominent?

Good point! Even as we did the presentation of the project at the end of the hackathon, one of the judges immediately mentioned how he needed loads of tips, as he was at home with two teenage kids.

We unfortunately haven't found a lot on this topic (if you do, please submit!) but a team member did find this article that you might find useful: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/the-family-loc... I actually thought we'd already self-submitted it to Homenauts but seems like we missed it, so I just added it. I put it in the "Mental Health" section for now. But creating a separate category/tag for living with co-homenauts, as you suggest, sounds like a good idea.

Stay safe (all three of you!) and hope you find any of the links useful

Thanks for the link, it seems useful. Luckily our own situation is quite good at the moment in this sense, so no need to worry. We're about two weeks in to moderate self-isolation without any major meltdowns, and that's with a fairly intense study schedule for the kids that the school prescribed. But I definitely see the current situation continuing for many more weeks at least, so it's good to be proactive and smart about it. Especially with an interesting mix of introverts in the house (my son and myself) and extroverts (wife and daughter). Keep up the good work!

Great idea. Not sure if you're accepting suggestions?

We are running educational virtual exploration lessons for children around the world (think guided tour of Everest, the Amazon rainforest, etc.).

More here: https://www.trekview.org/blog/2020/treehouse-academy-emergen...

Would be brilliant to have it listed on Homenauts.

Ignore that, can see the submit link on PC.

Note, the submit button does not render on mobile.

Very true and thanks! Don't know how we missed this. I've shared it with the team so we can fix it ASAP :)

Did you already submit? I definitely think your site deserves to be linked! I can't see your link in our list of links pending approval. I can add the link directly if you want, but then it'll look like I'm trying to take credit for finding it ;p

panoramas4good - Thanks! I approved your link and it can now be seen at https://homenauts.com/kids-playtime-and-schooling/ (as well as through the main page of course). But there isn't that much information at the link you submitted https://treehouse.trekview.org/, especially compared to the link you posted here https://www.trekview.org/blog/2020/treehouse-academy-emergen... Would you like to change the link, or will more info be added soon to treehouse.trekview.org? :)

Yes -- please update. And thanks again for producing this great resource (from everyone here in my local community).

Done! I also slightly changed the wording to emphasize that it's educative and free, hope that's OK. Good luck teaching the kids :)

This is great! I've got my own collection of tips I'm sharing on social media. See links below.

https://facebook.com/socialapproaching https://instagram.com/socialapproaching

Nice!

Since there's no better to place for it I'll mention one thing about gathering resources (like at your FB page), hope that's okay: I think there are a lot of people like you and our team who try to gather inspiration and resources right now. For instance, a homenaut submitted a link to this tumblr account https://pandemicjoy.tumblr.com/ The tumblr account has actually linked to us I see, but I'm a bit uncertain about that. People might get confused if we link to one another, since they probably expect to come to a resource when following a link but instead come to another list of resources. I'm thinking it's best if we all draw inspiration from each other but try to keep our own styles/niches, since different people have different tastes and what gets their motivation going :) I'd imagine the "homenaut" theme might make some people cringe for instance :p

I saw on your Instagram that you have a WIP at https://socialapproaching.com/. When it's done, if you think it fits in the "resource-itself" category, please submit it for the "Social Contact and Communication" category at Homenauts if you want :D

Will do! Thanks! Currently for the Instagram account, I'm planning on keeping this to small bite-sized tips that people can have pop up in their feed on a regular basis. I'm posting the same content on Facebook as well as some links to longer-form resources. Eventually, I was planning on having the content on the website actually be somewhat similar to what's currently on Homenauts, so I may have to rethink that :)

Also, since you're here, if I find any good tips on Homenauts.com that would be suitable for the bite-sized social media I'm aiming for, would you mind if I ripped them off? I can certainly find ways to give credit if needed. (Although this is a bit of a pain on Instagram since individual posts can't directly have links.)

You mean links or any of the text/original content on the site? When it comes to the links, you of course don't need to explain that you found them through our site (unless you'd e. g. grab all of the links from one of the categories in one go I guess). For the original content, if you want to use material from us word-for-word then please do your best to link to the site or otherwise explain where you got it from. If it's just a general idea (like "try to keep up with your routines") that you got from us but describe in your own words, you don't need to credit us. If it's any help you can also look at the content policy https://homenauts.com/our-content-policy/

Btw, you can also refer to our Twitter account if you prefer https://twitter.com/homenauts

Thanks for clarifying :)

This is great, but the big block of graphic at the top of the page is incorrect. Start with the "See by Topic" stuff and make them lots bigger.

Thanks for the feedback! When you say incorrect, I guess you mean that it's basically wrong to have the big block of graphic as it goes against sound web design/layout principles, making it harder to navigate et c? I can see what you mean and I agree that we probably should emphasize the browse by topic links more than we currently do. I'll send this on to the rest of the team. Please note that it might take some time before we use all the feedback we're getting because we all have day jobs (I'm gonna have to compensate later for today hehe), but we greatly appreciate it :)

Neat idea. What do you foresee your greatest challenge being?

Thank you, and there are a lot of challenges! The greatest one I think is making sure that users find content that's a) relevant, b) more than just some quick-fix temporary entertainment and c) something they'll want to do and feel ready to do. We don't want the site to be something that people only use to passively ease the pain for a while (though that is of course helpful sometimes), we want them to also find things that engage them. We've talked in the team about this quite a lot and how difficult it can be.

Ideally, in time, there would be some kind of system that lets users input some basic info about who they are and what they like, and then the site would make suggestions with say a) what content sections/tags that might be relevant, b) a specific link/site that might be interesting, and c) a specific activity that the user can try, that wouldn't take much time or effort and still be interesting. We want to help people get the ball rolling with getting more active in their homes.

Speaking from clinical psychology experience and from I guess just general experience of being a human, I know how hard it is for people to start new habits. You want the person to get started with something that's meaningful while also being fun/interesting enough to compete with watching another YouTube video - which again, is totally fine in moderation, it's just when the passivity becomes too much of a pattern that it's a problem.

Do you see a particular challenge we should keep in mind? :)

You're welcome, thanks for elaborating on things.

"Do you see a particular challenge we should keep in mind? :)"

Yes, making enough people aware that you exist in the first place.

Hehe, good point.

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