FAQs

What is Xanthan?

Xanthan gives you a working website and the documentation to change it, designed specifically for historians, educators, and researchers who want a place to showcase their work, manage a collaborative class website, or experiment with digital storytelling.

What makes Xanthan different:

No closed platforms. Everything runs through GitHub, a free platform that both stores your files and publishes your website.
Plain text editing. You write in simple Markdown (like writing an email with a few formatting shortcuts), not complex code. You don’t need to wade through a complex admin interface to edit a few lines of prose.
Built for sustainability. Your site is made of simple files that will work decades from now, not locked into a platform that you need to keep paying for.

You don’t need to know how to code to use Xanthan. If you can edit a text document and follow step-by-step instructions, you can build and maintain a website.

How long will it take to actually create my own site?

It takes 10-15 minutes to read through and follow the directions for creating a new site from one of the Xanthan templates. At that point, you’ll have your own functioning website that you can start to customize to fit your needs.

As with doing anything for the first time, there is a startup cost with learning a new workflow. After you get your site working, it takes about an hour to really make your site look different from the sample template because you will be learning where files are, where to make changes in the files, and deciding how to organize information on your pages and site. But it’s fast and easy after you get familiar with how things work. This is the investment that building your own site requires, but it pays great dividends later on.

Why not use a commercial platform?

Commercial platforms are easier to start with. Wix and Squarespace give you drag-and-drop interfaces, instant previews, and polished templates you can customize in minutes. ESRI StoryMaps gives you a visual editor with mapping built in. If you need something published quickly and don’t care how it works, they do the job well.

Most people don’t really choose these platforms so much as arrive at them by default. They are well-known and the features are easy to see.

So why choose Xanthan instead? Because Xanthan prioritizes different values:

Ownership. On a commercial platform, your content lives on someone else’s servers in their proprietary format. If you want to leave, you can’t take the site with you—you rebuild from scratch. With Xanthan, you own the files. Your entire site is text files in a repository you control. Want to move to a different host? Just move your files to another platform.

No subscription fees. Xanthan sites are free to host on GitHub Pages. Wix and Squarespace require ongoing payments ($16-$40/month) to remove ads, use a custom domain, or access collaboration features. StoryMaps requires an ArcGIS subscription, usually institutional—which quietly ties your work to a campus account you’ll lose when you change jobs or graduate. That’s a big dependency you don’t control.

Collaboration without paywalls. Multi-user collaboration on commercial platforms requires expensive team plans, and most publishing tools assume a single author addressing an audience. GitHub’s collaboration tools are free and industry-standard. Students, colleagues, and contributors can work on your site together, and the version history shows who wrote what.

Learning real skills. Wix teaches you how to use Wix. StoryMaps teaches you how to use StoryMaps. Xanthan teaches you web fundamentals—skills that transfer to any digital project you’ll ever work on. You build digital literacy while building your site.

Stability and longevity. Commercial platforms can change pricing, shut down features, or disappear entirely (remember GeoCities? Google Sites Classic?). Xanthan is built on HTML, CSS, and Markdown—technologies that have worked for decades and will keep working for decades more.

The tradeoff: Xanthan has a learning curve. You’ll spend 10-15 minutes deploying your first site, then an hour or two learning how to customize it. That investment pays off with complete control, zero ongoing costs, and skills you’ll use for years.

Who should use a commercial platform instead:

You need a site this week and don’t care about learning
You don’t plan to maintain the site long-term
You’re comfortable with monthly fees, or someone else is paying them
You won’t need to migrate your content elsewhere

Who should use Xanthan:

You want to own your content
You’re willing to invest a few hours to gain full creative control
You’re building something you want to work on for a while
You value learning how things work
You want free hosting with no ads or subscriptions

How does this compare to ESRI StoryMaps?

StoryMaps is a mature commercial product with a drag-and-drop editor, ArcGIS maps and data layers built right in, and years of polish. Xanthan’s ScrollStories are simpler, and making one means editing text files rather than clicking through an interface.

The tradeoff: StoryMaps trades control for convenience. Xanthan trades convenience for control. Which one you want depends on whether your story is a one-off project that you will soon move on from, or something you intend to own, revise, and hand to other people.

Bottom line: Choose StoryMaps for a shorter learning curve and visual interface; choose Xanthan for openness, collaboration, flexibility, and sustainability.

Hidden costs of quickness: StoryMaps is usually chosen by default rather than compared to anything, so it’s worth saying plainly: your story lives on ESRI’s servers, in ESRI’s format, for as long as ESRI supports it and your institution pays for it. You can’t export it and host it elsewhere, colleagues can’t contribute to it, and future collaborators won’t have access to your account. A ScrollStory is a folder of text files you keep forever. That argument applies to any commercial platform—it’s laid out in full above. The rest of this answer is about what each tool can actually do.

What StoryMaps does better:

Visual editing. You see your story as you build it. Xanthan asks you to edit text files then preview the result.
Maps and spatial data. StoryMaps integrates ArcGIS directly—layers, geocoding, spatial analysis, hosted feature services. Nothing in Xanthan matches that. If maps are your argument, StoryMaps is better.
Data visualization. Charts, tables, and interactive graphics come ready-made. In Xanthan you build those yourself.
It works out of the box. Sensible defaults, no setup, institutional support if your campus already has ArcGIS.

What Xanthan does better:

Nothing is off-limits. A closed interface gives you the layouts ESRI decided to build. With Xanthan, anything you can imagine is possible—especially with AI to help you make it: your own typography, your own pacing, a custom map, a chart library, a component nobody has thought of yet. You’re never constrained to what comes in the box.
It’s part of your site, not a detour. A ScrollStory can be embedded in any kind of Xanthan site with many other pages and components, sharing the same navigation and design. A StoryMap is a separate destination you link out to.
Many hands on the same story. Students and colleagues can draft in parallel, propose changes, and see exactly who wrote what. StoryMaps assumes one owner/author.
It’s portable and long-lasting. Plain HTML and CSS will still render decades from now wherever you host them. Your work always travels with you; it’s not stuck on a proprietary platform.

About the learning curve: Xanthan does ask more of you technically, and that’s real. But the work isn’t Xanthan-specific. When you learn StoryMaps, you learn how to use their interface. When you learn Xanthan, you learn how the web itself works—knowledge that applies to everything else you’ll ever build.

See the ScrollStory examples for what Xanthan can do today: immersive scrolling narratives, text that appears and fades as you scroll, image transitions and side-scrolling sequences, Juxtapose comparisons, and complete control over type, color, and pacing.

Technology is always changing. Why spend time on this?

People often argue that learning web tools is futile because technology changes so fast. But static site tools like Xanthan actually represent the opposite trend—they embrace stability, simplicity, and longevity in web development.

They rely on enduring web fundamentals. Static sites are built with plain HTML, CSS, and sometimes minimal JavaScript—technologies that have been stable for decades. Unlike many web frameworks that rise and fall in popularity, these core technologies don’t go away. Learning them gives you skills that will still matter far in the future.
They resist unnecessary complexity. Modern web development often piles on layers of abstraction (frameworks, dependencies, servers) to function at all. Static sites intentionally strip that away. You don’t need an interface to edit your site; you edit simple plaintext files that you can open anywhere. This simplicity is a form of technological resilience.
They model sustainable design principles. By focusing on lightweight, portable content that can last indefinitely, static sites embody the ideals of digital preservation. They don’t depend on a proprietary platform or a server that might vanish.
They teach timeless design thinking. Learning to run a static site is also learning how to structure information clearly, design for readability, and separate content from presentation—all principles that extend far beyond any one technology stack.

Why Build a Personal Website?

Many people wonder if they need a personal website in an age of social media, academic platforms, and portfolio services. Here’s why having your own site matters:

Own your content and your presence. Platforms like Academia.edu, Medium, or LinkedIn can change their rules, shut down, or lock you out. Your own website gives you complete control over your work and how it’s presented.

Create a professional hub. Instead of scattering your work across multiple platforms, a personal site becomes the central, authoritative source for your projects, writing, CV, and contact information.

Showcase work your way. Present your projects exactly how you envision them, not constrained by platform templates or character limits. Tell your story the way you want it told.

Learn valuable skills. Building and maintaining your own site teaches you how the web actually works—skills that are increasingly valuable in any field.

Ready to build? Check out the Getting Started guide.

Where did Xanthan come from?

Xanthan grew out of classroom experiments, not any particular intention.

It started with a pragamtic question from an early Fred Gibbs historiography course: how could students share pre-class reflections easily with each other outside a LMS that was about to be retired? A GitHub repository was the experiment.

The student response was the surprise. Students loved the openness, the way we could engage with their reflections in class. They wanted to use it for their final projects. And then they wanted a website to collect and showcaase their essays, just like for daily assignments.

Each semester, and new courses, led to new challenges, solutions, failures, improvements. After a little while, there was a bonafide—albeit rough—framework. It just needed a name that helped bring everything together. Like the gum.

Why is Xanthan open source?

Xanthan is intentionally open source to leverage the collective knowledge and skills of digital public history practitioners. Rather than keeping expertise siloed within institutions or commercial platforms, open source development allows historians, educators, and developers to collaborate, share solutions, and collectively expand our capabilities.

This collaborative approach means that improvements made by one person benefit everyone. When someone solves a layout problem, adds a new feature, or clarifies documentation, that knowledge becomes available to the entire community. It’s a model that aligns with the values of public history itself: making knowledge accessible, building shared resources, and working together to tell better stories.

By contributing to Xanthan, you’re not just improving a tool—you’re participating in a community effort to make web publishing more accessible and sustainable for scholars and public historians.

Can I request a feature or report a bug?

Absolutely! GitHub provides an issue tracker that makes it easy to report bugs, request features, or ask questions about Xanthan.

To submit an issue:

Visit the Xanthan GitHub repository
Click the “Issues” tab
Click the green “New Issue” button
Describe your bug or feature request with as much detail as possible

What makes a good issue:

Clear, descriptive title (e.g., “Navigation menu doesn’t work on mobile” instead of “Bug”)
Steps to reproduce the problem (for bugs)
What you expected to happen vs. what actually happened
Screenshots or examples when relevant
Links to your repository if applicable

Don’t worry about being too detailed—the more information you provide, the easier it is for us to help. And check existing issues first; someone might have already reported the same thing!

How can I contribute to Xanthan?

We’d love your help making Xanthan better! There are several ways to contribute:

Report bugs or suggest features. If you encounter issues or have ideas for improvements, open an issue on the Xanthan GitHub repository. Clear descriptions and examples help us understand and address your feedback.

Improve documentation. Notice something unclear in the guides? Found a typo? Documentation improvements are incredibly valuable. You can suggest edits or submit pull requests to help others learn more easily.

Share your examples. Built something cool with Xanthan? Share your site! Real-world examples help others see what’s possible and inspire new use cases.

Contribute code. If you’re comfortable with Jekyll, CSS, or JavaScript, we welcome pull requests that fix bugs, add features, or improve performance. Check the issues page for good first contributions.

Spread the word. Tell colleagues, students, or friends who might benefit from building their own site. The more people using Xanthan, the better it becomes.

Start by visiting the Xanthan repository to see current issues and contribution guidelines.