Educators are increasingly putting open licenses on their content, making it legal to copy, redistribute, even remix that content for other purposes. But it’s not always easy to remix that content. A Word document or a single-page website is easy enough, but what about a whole course website? an online textbook? Even with the rights to remix, it’s not always easy to remix.
A few weeks ago, I announced the alpha version of Peasy, a new platform for web publishing. The idea behind Peasy is to make it easy to get a simple site ― even a single page ― onto the web, and to make it easy to share, clone, and remix websites. Editing web content with Peasy is as simple as clicking “Edit this page” and then making changes directly on the website. No back-ends, themes, plugins, or templates to worry about. Just you and your content. And cloning an existing Peasy site is as simple as clicking “Import” and entering the web address of the site you want to clone.
You can get started with Peasy here.
After sharing the alpha version and running it through the ringer on my current course website, I’ve made a few significant updates. These updates make it even easier to get your first website up and running, or to start sharing and remixing things like course websites and open educational resources (OER).
The Peasy beta (version 0.1) adds support for banner images, additional text formatting options, and fixes a bug that required constant refreshing in order to see updates as you build your site. You can also decide which pages appear in the main menu of the site, making it easier for Peasy to support large, multi-page sites like online textbooks. Some back-end changes also make it play more nicely with search engines and site scrapers.
I’ve got a lot of hopes for the future of Peasy ― not just style updates and more user options, but a more automated installation process, notifications when your site is cloned, partial site imports, and networking with other platforms. But for now, I want to make it easy for anyone who wants to to get their ideas up on the open web, in a format that makes it easy to clone and remix. If that’s you, consider giving Peasy a whirl. And let me know how it goes!
Photo by Andrew Coelho.