This is Zurbu.

A good place to collect, organize, share, and preserve knowledge on things you care about.

One community — multiple thematic projects.

Projects can…

… be public or private

Share it or keep it to yourselves and people you trust. Hide or publish when you feel like it.

… be collaborative or read-only

Be the only narrator, select your co-authors — or let the world join the talk! Switch anytime, too.

… have different licences

Protect your findings or let the world copy them like Wikipedia articles — you’re in control!

… use own domains

Use <your_subdomain>.zurbu.app or build your brand with a custom one.

Take a look at some of them:

1201:future

Riga is not ready (but at least it tries). City development updates and ideas.

1201:past

History of Riga. The project where it all started.

Valmiera

Exploring history of Valmiera, Latvia. Managed by the town's local history museum.

Projects are made of notes.

From one-liners to long reads, here are the latest ones:

Feel free to build notes with

… and make forum-like discussion threads.

And it’s all about organizing data.

Drop the notes but never lose them.

Organize at your own pace.

Find everything for your workflow at a glance, on a special page called “Chaos”.

Tags build the core of the data structure. Modesty aside — they nail it.

Apart from being a simple tool for labeling notes (and other tags, too!), they can have…

… metadata
  • Aliases
  • Locations
  • Milestone dates
  • External references
… hierarchy
  • Imagine having a tag called Notre-Dame de Paris. The tag page will obviously show everything explicitly labeled.
  • Add a polygon-shaped location outlining the contour of the great building to your tag. Then create another one called Spire of Notre-Dame de Paris and mark it on the map — this surely will be inside that. Thus, everything labeled with this new tag will be shown, too.
  • Create a third tag called Gargoyles of Notre-Dame de Paris, but assign its location as simply Notre-Dame de Paris rather than adding new points on the map. Expect the same effect.
  • And finally — Reconstruction of Notre-Dame de Paris. Label it with Notre-Dame de Paris. See what happened?
… categories
  • Categories are primitive on purpose — just title, no more than one category per tag.
  • Good examples would be People or Places or anything you wish.
  • Tags are grouped by categories in alphabetical lists.
  • Optionally configure your favourite categories to list their tags on the main page of your project.

Both notes and tags can be added to boards — essentially tags with implied tasks.

The tools are abstract.

The rules are yours.

Zurbu shines when knowledge fits on a map.

But that’s not required.

… and expect more geography to come.

Preserve your knowledge.

Safeguard your efforts with daily exports.

ZIP files with full export data are generated daily for each project.

What’s inside? An SQLite database for text, and all uploaded files.

Available to project owners only by default — but can be published, too.

Choose a plan that fits you best.

Try the free one — enough for small projects.

BasicPremium

Limits

File uploads

Maximum total size of uploaded files in project.

100.00M25.00G

Optional features

Public export data

Everyone can download project data exports.

Configurable note licensing

Allows choosing own licence for each note.

Private project visibility

Only selected users can see what’s inside.

Price

MonthlyFree€10.00
AnnualFree€100.00

Built with enthusiasm and experience.

Zurbu wasn't built in a day.

2001
A school project on 800th anniversary of Riga evolves into a popular blog on history and sights of the city.
2004
An old-school forum is added to the blog. People start talking.
2009
Zurbu, a moonshot at creating blogs and forums for local history enthusiasts worldwide, is launched. Old blog articles get migrated there.
2024
Finally, the current version of Zurbu appears. Rewritten from scratch, with all the existing data and new content, and an ambitious goal of providing like-minded people a convenient and safe space for the things they care about.

Who’s behind it?