Going Live

Every family museum has two sides: the sandbox you build in, and the live museum the family visits. You work freely in one; the other only ever changes on purpose. This page is how something crosses from the first to the second — what you do, what we do, and how long it takes.

Why there are two

The sandbox exists so you can be wrong. Reorder a room six times, try a note and delete it, publish a film to see how it sits, change your mind — none of it is visible to the family, so nothing has to be right the first time. That freedom is the point.

The live museum is the opposite: it should feel settled. A family opening it on a Sunday shouldn’t catch it mid-edit. So it doesn’t track your changes continuously — it changes when someone decides it should.

Note

This is also why nothing you do in the sandbox can break the live museum. They read from separate content, so an experiment can’t leak.

The shape of it

flowchart LR
  A["Curate\n(sandbox)"] --> B["Hand it over\n'I'm happy with it'"]
  B --> C{"Quality gate\na second pair of eyes"}
  C -->|"something's off"| A
  C -->|"cleared"| D["Scheduled move\n~48h notice · overnight"]
  D --> E["Live museum"]
  E -->|"any further change"| A

Two things that loop are worth reading twice: a review that finds something sends it back to the sandbox, not onto the live museum — and once a museum is live, every further change starts the same circuit again. There is no shortcut from the sandbox straight to a live museum.

The three stages

1. You curate — in the sandbox. Add the films and stories, write the notes, set the order, decide which rooms are open and which stay behind a “coming soon” tile. Take as long as you need; nothing here is public. When it reads the way you want it to read, you’re done — you don’t publish it yourself.

2. We review — the quality gate. Tell us you’re happy and we go through it before anything moves. We’re checking the things that are easy to miss from inside the work: films that don’t play or point at the wrong link, covers that are cropped or missing, rooms still marked “coming soon” that you meant to open, durations and framing text that didn’t get filled in. If we find something, you hear about it before the family would.

3. We move it live — with 48 hours’ notice. Once it’s cleared, we schedule the move and it happens overnight in your time zone, so nobody is ever looking at the museum while it changes. We ask for about 48 hours’ notice to do that cleanly. When it’s done, you get the confirmation and the link to share.

Why a second pair of eyes

The gate isn’t about trust — it’s that nobody proofreads their own work well. After hours inside a museum you stop seeing it: the film that points at the wrong link, the cover that never got replaced, the room still marked “coming soon”. A reader who wasn’t there catches those in minutes, and the family never meets them.

It’s deliberate for now rather than forever. As the tooling grows more of these checks itself, the gate can loosen — but while a mistake is only caught by a person, we’d rather that person be us than a grandchild opening the museum on a Sunday.

What to check before you hand it over

A short pass of your own makes the review quick. Walk the museum as a visitor would and look for:

Look at	You want
Every room you intend to open	Set to open — not still “coming soon”
Each film and story	Plays, and is the cut you meant to use
Covers	Present and uncropped — or left blank on purpose (see below)
Order	The piece you want to lead is leading
Notes and framing text	Filled in where a placement earns one; deliberately blank elsewhere

Tip

Covers are the one place where blank is a real choice. Leave a film’s cover empty and the museum uses the film’s own thumbnail automatically. Upload one only when you want a specific frame — and if you do, use a clean full-frame still, not a screenshot with black bars, or it shows as a thin strip.

What “moving it live” actually does

The move replaces the live museum with what’s in the sandbox — as a whole, at that moment. It isn’t a merge of the two sides.

In practice that matters in one situation: if the live museum has been open to relatives and has taken photo submissions since the sandbox was made, those live-only additions need to be carried across before the move, or they’d be left behind. We handle that as part of the move — but it’s worth knowing why we ask whether anything has come in.

Caution

This is also why the review sits where it does. After the move, the family’s museum is what you built. Fixing something afterwards is a normal edit — but a family may have already seen it.

After it’s live

You keep curating exactly as before — in the sandbox. What changes is that the sandbox is no longer the thing visitors see, so getting work in front of them means going round the circuit again.

• Every change to what’s on the walls repeats the three stages. A new room, a re-cut film, a reordering, a rewritten note — curate it in the sandbox, tell us, we review and schedule it. This is the part people expect to be able to skip; it’s the part that keeps a live family museum from changing under someone’s feet.
• Approving a submitted photo is the exception, because it isn’t a sandbox edit at all. Visitor submissions arrive on the live museum and you approve or hold them there, the way you always have — they appear at the next refresh, with no review in between.
• The refresh is slower on a live museum than in the sandbox. In the sandbox you see changes almost immediately; on a live museum, visitors see them after the next scheduled refresh. See How Curation Works for the exact behaviour.

The sandbox and the live museum drift apart

Because the two sides hold separate copies, a correction made directly on the live museum — something we occasionally do to fix an urgent problem — does not travel back into the sandbox. Left alone, the next move would carry the old version forward and undo the fix.

So when we repair something on a live museum, the same correction gets made in the sandbox too. If we ever tell you we’ve fixed something live, that’s your cue to check it looks right in the sandbox as well.

Note

If something is wrong on the live museum and it can’t wait for the next refresh, say so directly — we can push a refresh out of cycle. That’s the exception, not the rhythm.