Share it or keep it to yourselves and people you trust. Hide or publish when you feel like it.
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
… 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
- Text
- Quotes
- Links
- Images
- Documents
- Aliases
- Locations
- Milestone dates
- External references
… 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.
- And just like with tags, you can add same item to multiple boards.
- Hide them or show them, grant permissions to configure them — or even edit every item added.
- Boards can be configured to hide added items from people without access to them. Looking for a drafts or trash folder? Look no further!
The tools are abstract.
The rules are yours.
Zurbu shines when knowledge fits on a map.
But that’s not required.
- Assign locations to your tags and notes
- See all notes within polygon-located tags
- Mark locations with issues
- Import places from OpenStreetMap
- Export data as GeoJSON
… 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.
| Basic | Premium | |
|---|---|---|
Limits |
||
File uploadsMaximum total size of uploaded files in project. | 100.00M | 25.00G |
Optional features |
||
Public export dataEveryone can download project data exports. | ||
Configurable note licensingAllows choosing own licence for each note. | ||
Private project visibilityOnly selected users can see what’s inside. | ||
Price |
||
| Monthly | Free | €10.00 |
| Annual | Free | €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.
