https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/blog
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The square has acquired a noticeboard. This is significant municipal news. The Guest Notes board is now included with Supporter: a small place for visitors to leave a hello, a recommendation, or the sort of thought that absolutely cannot wait until they have opened a text editor. Visitors write under their current TownSquare name, browse recent or popular messages, and respond with a heart or smile. Notes appear live for everyone in the square. Should a note turn out to be less "guest book" and…
The Town Square Gazette has completed its first census and assembled the results into several charts. The clerks insist that all 65,289 recorded visits were counted individually, by hand, using three very small pencils, all now exhausted. They report sore wrists and a growing suspicion that spreadsheets were invented for a reason. Management has declined to correct them while they recover. This was TownSquare's first full calendar month in the world. June had been a blur of launch day, Hacker…
With the World Cup nearly finished, the Town Square Gazette is pleased to report that a football has at last been placed in the Square. The timing has been questioned. The Council replies that it was waiting to see whether the sport would catch on. It belongs to everyone, obeys no team colours, and may be kicked by the advanced sporting technique of running directly into it. Visitors who approach with enthusiasm will find the ball returns the sentiment, travelling farther when met at speed. The…
The Town Square Gazette is pleased to report that the Square has hired a team of meteorologists, together with one scientist who says they can control the weather. The meteorologists have brought charts, thermometers and a commendably serious approach to clouds. The scientist has brought several switches and declined to say where the lightning comes from. Between them, they can now arrange clear skies, rain, snow and storms. Until now, weather in the Square was managed according to the…
The first TownSquare map drew a line between two towns when their owners linked them together. It did the job, but it also looked exactly like what it was: a graph laid over a map. If you would prefer the in-universe version, The Town Square Gazette has also published Gazette Notice: the cartographers have at last learned what roads are. The lines were thin, even and happy to pass straight through anything in their way. Forest in the middle? Straight through it. Mountain range? No problem. A…
The Town Square Gazette is pleased to report that the cartographers have completed their retraining and can now, in most cases, identify a road. Readers may remember the previous map edition, in which every connection between towns was represented by a determined line charging across the countryside with no regard for trees, mountains, rivers, or basic decency. Several forests were bisected. One lake was treated as a suggestion. At least three uninvolved towns found themselves with lines…
Who's in a town square at any given moment is mostly chance. Sometimes you land on an empty scene, sometimes a small crowd, and there's no way to know who else might show up, or when. But it doesn't have to stay that way. If you've added a message board to your square from the admin page, you already have a spot where visitors stop and read. Instead of a generic note, try posting something like: The message board with a scheduled meetup. That's it. That's the whole trick. Why it works The…
Over the past few weeks, conversations about TownSquare have appeared in GitHub issues, emails, Hacker News threads, blog comments, and private messages. People have shared ideas, feature requests, bug reports, screenshots, and stories about the little corners of the web they've built. It felt like the community needed a place of its own. So today I'm happy to announce the opening of the TownSquare Town Hall. Unlike TownSquares themselves, where conversations are fleeting and visitors come and…
A lot of you asked for a way to put your townsquare on stream, so I built it. TownSquare now has a livestream overlay. This guide walks through adding that overlay to your stream. The overlay is a browser-source URL, so any app that supports browser sources can use it. In this guide we'll use OBS as the example. The overlay is watch-only. It shows the live square without adding a new active visitor, so putting it in a streaming app should not inflate the count or make a fake person appear in…
TownSquare now has 100 verified sites on the map, nearly 330,000 messages exchanged, and a growing network of signposts linking one inhabited corner of the web to the next.
A lightweight "N people here" badge you can drop on any page. It links to your town square without loading the whole square.
Optional extras for TownSquare Plus — hats, wandering cats, and Telegram pings when someone says hello.
A visit to Low Sound, a personal blog by Toronto-based developer Omar. We talk about the early web, homelabs, cycling across Canada, game engine development, beloved pets, and why having a small corner of the internet still matters.
