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About

Built with Wikidown

This site’s documentation — the build guide, materials list, image prompts, and this page — is a Wikidown wiki: plain markdown pages with .order files for navigation, versioned in the open GitHub repo. The wiki tool itself, Wikidown, is also open source. Anyone can read the source or open a pull request.

Published with GitHub Pages

This site is built with Jekyll and published through GitHub Pages, using the minima theme as a base. The header, footer, and page styling are customized on top of that — the nav bar, the GitHub link, and the footer credits are all overrides layered on minima’s defaults.

The Home page and the rest of the docs use different templates. Home is a one-off, hand-built layout — its own hero section, event details, and “Paint with us” copy, styled specifically for that page. Every other page (this one included) is a plain Wikidown page: a title, a breadcrumb, and content in H2 sections, using minima’s default page styling without any of Home’s custom layout. That’s a deliberate split — Home is the front door for people who haven’t seen the project before, and the docs pages are reference material meant to stay simple and easy to skim.

Backed by Open Eugene

The Painted Porch is backed by Open Eugene, a local nonprofit whose mission is being a community connector. They back a number of projects around town — the Painted Porch isn’t listed there yet, but it’s part of the same effort.

About Mark Davis

Mark Davis makes large-scale interactive art projects. He opened Westish Shop last year to consolidate and thin out a backlog of projects — including KING-PONG — that had been sitting in storage since COVID. The shop now runs popup events as part of the larger Warehouse District Art Hop, and the Painted Porch is one of them. Mark also maintains this site and the column build docs. More of his writing lives at marks.wiki.

Why we invite people in

Nobody needs a prescribed skill level or a credential to make something here. The porch doesn’t gate who gets to pick up a brush or pull up a chair, and a finished column belongs more to whoever showed up than to whoever built it. That’s the point of keeping the docs, the plans, and the columns themselves open: the more hands that touch this project, the more it becomes something the street actually made together. See Paint with us on the Home page for what to expect when you show up.