Ollin entries come in four kinds: Articles for stories and teachings, Artifacts for preserved objects of the People, Discoveries for interactive slide-style storytelling, and Videos for footage recorded on territory. You can tend to an entry's details right on its card bundle editor, or open the intuitive full-screen editor and write the piece exactly as readers will see it.

Set up an entry's details

When you select an entry, its details appear right there for editing.

  1. Fill in the entry's title, description, and slug (the short name other entries use to point to this one).
  2. Under Taxonomy, give the entry a category (like "Story"), add topics as chips (type one and press Enter to add it), and pick a modality: Read, Listen, Watch, Walk, or Reflect.
  3. Under Community, record who this belongs to: nation, territory, contributor, and their role.
  4. Under Theme palette, set the entry's colors: background, lightest, light, medium, dark, neutral, and accent. Every page of this entry is painted with these colors, on your screen and on the device.

When you are ready to write, press Open canvas editor. Tabs across the top take you to the main piece (Article, Object, or Slides, depending on the entry's kind), plus Card and Export.

Write an Article

The article page is directly editable in the full-screen editor, like editing a document. Select any part and type to begin.

  1. Click the large empty frame at the top to select a photo. You can add multiple photos for a slideshow in the hero, or stick with just one. With photos in place, hover over the frame for arrows to flip through them. You may also see icon buttons to Add image, Move earlier, Move later, or Remove image.
  2. Click the small line above the title to set the category, then click the title and the Contributor and Role lines beneath it.
  3. Write in the body where it says "Write the article…". Select text to use the small formatting toolbar: Bold, Italic, Paragraph, Section heading, Quote, and List.
  4. Below the body, add keyword chips ("Add a keyword…") and, to enrich the Article, trailing blocks: Audio (with a speaker name and optional transcript), Credits (press + contributor and + reference for each line), or a Place with its name and descriptions.

Record an Artifact

An Artifact entry presents like a museum record card, and every line edits in place.

  1. Under Object record, type the name of the object and its date or period.
  2. Click the square frame to add photographs of the object.
  3. Fill the record rows beside the photos: Materials, Dimensions, Accession, Provenance, Current location, Contributors, and Access protocols. Empty rows stay hidden on the device. It is a good idea to populate only with information you are able to provide from records.
  4. Under Traditional Knowledge Labels, press + label, choose a label code (TK A, TK NC, and the rest of the standard set), name the People it derived from (such as your own or prior), and add its meaning if you wish.
  5. Write the Cultural narrative: explain how this object lives in the People, in your words. At the bottom, connect related entries by typing their slugs.

Build a Discovery

Discoveries are interactive, full-screen slides similar to social media "stories" but with richer, scrollable context. A rail of small slide previews runs along the editor; press the Add slide button to add one.

  1. For each slide, pick a look: Full bleed (a photo fills the frame), Color field (a solid color), or Split (color and image share the frame).
  2. Set Align and Anchor to place the text, add a background image, and soften it with the Tint slider. A photo can even continue onto the following slide with Span across next slide.
  3. Add slide content: Heading, Text, Quote, Image, Audio, or Credits. Click any text on the slide and type.

Some Discovery entries also have an additional Layout tab (a free canvas where you can drag, size, and rotate each piece and fine-tune colors and type).

Publish a Video

A Video entry plays full screen in Ollin: portrait footage fills the frame edge to edge, landscape footage fits with dark bands, and the contributor's byline, title, and description rest over the bottom of the picture.

  1. Under New bundle, tap Video, type a Title, and press Create.
  2. Import your video file. That one step does most of the work: PAC Manager reads the footage and fills in the length, detects whether it is portrait or landscape, pulls a poster frame from the video itself, and renders a motion cover: a short, silent loop taken from your footage. The motion cover becomes the card's picture, so the video breathes on the Dashboard and on your home board instead of sitting still. The poster stays as the frame people see just before the video starts.
  3. Check the poster and the motion cover. Happy with them? Move on. Each slot is its own button: click the poster to choose a different picture (or scrub the preview to a moment you love and capture that frame), and click the motion cover to re-render the loop starting from wherever you paused the preview.
  4. If you have a captions file (.vtt, the same kind used for web video), import it and the player offers captions.
  5. Fill in the byline under Community: the contributor's name and role appear over the video exactly as written.
  6. Press Save + Compile.

MP4 with common encoding (H.264 and AAC) plays on every device. If your footage is encoded another way or the bitrate is heavy for a memory card, PAC Manager notices and leaves a gentle note under the video, so you know before families do.

What the device shows

The device will show exactly what you composed: the same photos, colors, and layout, page for page. Keywords become touchable links, Traditional Knowledge Labels appear as small chips on the object record, and related entries open one another by their slugs. Videos open straight into the player from their Dashboard card, with a scrubber, mute, and tap to play or pause.