I started reposting my tutorials and got some very interesting feedback, one that stuck was that people did not know that these tutorials even existed as it was buried deep down in the website. As I spent hundreds of hours writing these tutorials, it got me wondering if the current search mechanism, through WordPress (or Google) the most intuitive way to search for my bespoke data visualisation tutorials? This set me down a rabbit hole of exploration, and I decided that I will dedicate an evening to coding a simple web application to allow people to more easily search my site, and the Tableau Data Viz Catalogue is what I came up with.
You can find the link to this application at https://tabcat.toanhoang.com
Application
The application is a very simple one which two open-source JavaScript libraries:
- jQuery for interactivity and functionality
- Materialize CSS as the front end framework (based on Google Material Design)
The resulting code is available on GitHub and you can access the code here: https://github.com/simplifyinsights/vizcatalogue
Future Enhancements
Over the next few weeks, I will be looking to add additional functionality and enhance the website to provide the following:
- Data Visualisation Descriptions: I want to add more in-depth descriptions for each data visualisation i.e. when to use these, what are the appropriate use cases and best practice alternatives.
- Enhanced Search: I want to add a quicker way to search, for example, If you want a waay to display categorical data, this will be the result of adding addition tags to the cards.
- Additional Authors: I want to add links to work created by other Tableau Authors, I think this could go a long way to being a full and quick way to find the data visualisations you want.
- Own Domain Name: Right now, the website sites as a subdomain, however, in time, I would like to have its own unique domain.
Volunteers Wanted
One area that I will need help on is writing the descriptions, as there are 100+ articles this will be extremely time-consuming, and as such, if you would like to help me write these, send me an email to toan.hoang@simplifyinsights.com