Stuffed animal social media

November 20, 2023 6:06 PM

My 11 year old announced he wants to keep track of all his stuffed animals. On paper, he has maybe invented 2005 Facebook all over again, for his imagination. How can we do this? (more inside)

His idea was to take pictures and then make a slide in Google slides for each creature but I said it would be cool if they were categorized by species, bloodline, etc. etc. He thinks he can roughly keep track of when he adopted each animal, it’s birthday, interesting facts, and so on.

So, what kind of ideas do you have for making this a fun winter break activity? Should this be done as a wiki, a Wordpress blog, just using an address book app? It should all be pretty simple but still wrinkle his brain a bit.

He has access to an old MacBook Air if there is anything software-specific. It doesn’t have to be published online in any way, because again, it’s a database of 100 stuffed animal pictures.

posted by sdrawkcab to Technology (12 answers total)

Fun! I would do this with a TiddlyWiki. You can do it all locally, and it's a good opportunity to learn wiki syntax and a gateway to lots of other fun wiki projects. The basics are easy: just set up one page per item, add photo and description. But you can link them back and forth, create pages for things like types or ages, place or time acquired, etc. This system will let him make it as deep and complex as he wants, while also being easy to start with.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:34 PM on November 20, 2023 [7 favorites]

Wiki sounds like a great option. This would also fit well within Airtable's free plan which could be fun.
posted by AaRdVarK at 6:53 PM on November 20, 2023

Maybe use a contacts app to create a "contact" for each animal. Many contacts programs include additional info fields like birthdate, and image/images for the "contact"
posted by TimHare at 10:34 PM on November 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

A wiki is a great idea, but a lower-stakes version could be a gogle sheet - they support photo embedding now. And putting together a spreadsheet would make it easy to upload to a database later if he wants.
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:42 AM on November 21, 2023

Mod note: [btw, this post has been added to the sidebar and Best Of blog]
posted by taz (staff) at 1:44 AM on November 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

I’ve got some wrinkle is brain questions from the perspective of information management:
- is there a pretend (or real) user of this database? For example, are stuff animals looking for one another? Is a kid looking for the perfect stuffed animal? Something else?
- would this pretend user be more likely to browse a database of animals or use search terms to find the perfect one (or a narrow list)?
- when thinking of categories you could think “literary warrant” or “user warrant” from indexing. Literary warrant would be how the stuff animal industry might describe them (like brand name or size). User warrant is how the person using the system would describe them (“fights monsters,” “extra fluffy”) there might be terms that would be used by both (think “car” and “automobile” and in that case you want to use a cross reference.
Get out a book with an index, a cookbook with an index, and a table of contents. Look at these different things when you’re coming up with your descriptors.
posted by CMcG at 7:50 AM on November 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

This sounds like an interesting project to do with Notion, which has a free personal plan. It includes both wiki and database elements, so he could experiment with how he wants to structure the data and present it. It's a bit brain-wrinkling even for adults, but I suspect a curious kid who watched a few YouTube videos could figure out how to do something fun with it.
posted by dreamyshade at 8:43 AM on November 21, 2023

Zoho Creator has a free tier and makes databases via drag-and-drop interfaces with the option to dig deeper into programming if one wants. I've found it to have a very low barrier to entry but also a lot of potential to be whatever one needs, and it's been great for learning how to think of databases. Don't bother with the templates, just treat it at first like you're making a survey form with Google or whatever and then go from there based on how well it serves the need. More specificity can always be added to established records later, so it's not even necessary to have all the "bloodline" stuff at first if his main goal is to have them all tracked.
posted by teremala at 9:37 AM on November 21, 2023

I also think a wiki would be a good choice for this, but would also lean toward something you can install and host locally, instead of an online service, especially a free one. The speed in which so many tech ventures just close up shop with little or no notice... it'd be a shame to lose that, or have it locked into some proprietary format that you couldn't migrate to another service. What a wonderful idea, and how interesting would it be for them to revisit this 20 years later?
posted by xedrik at 11:18 AM on November 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

A spreadsheet view might be too dry for your kid. Airtable does have card views which would be very visually appealing. Also seconding Notion.
posted by creatrixtiara at 4:52 PM on November 21, 2023

A basic, offline, locally stored website could teach him the basics of html if you or someone else could walk him through it. This kind of project would help him see how the internet is put together at a basic level.
posted by roaring beast at 8:55 AM on November 22, 2023

Okay here's kind of a weird pitch for a solve, but it might actually hit everything you need - a Campaign Tracker tool designed for tabletop role-playing games. Something like World Anvil has a free tier that can be used online as well as paid upgrades depending on what you want to do with it, but there are other options.

These tools are pretty explicitly designed to organize writeups of various characters including pics or art assets, searchable terms (species, adoption date, whatever), and linked interrelationships. In addition, one can create stories and timelines and add all sorts of other novel elements if this initial cataloging is a precursor to greater creative efforts. And if one of the stuffies is a plush d20, then the lifelong hobby/obsession with ttrpg can truly begin...
posted by FatherDagon at 9:49 AM on November 22, 2023