People’s Choice Awards

8 August 2007

No, not television, the American Civil War on the web.

I’m knocked over by Civil War Interactive’s (CWi) new list of the Top 20 Civil War Websites, on which Antietam on the Web hits #4 (with a bullet, so to speak).

Top 20 Award graphic from CWi

It’s very cool also to see blogs on the CWi list for the first time. Dmitri’s Bookshelf, Eric’s Ranting, and Mannie’s Rangerousness are all there. Hearty congratulations to them and all the online treats in the 2007 Top 20!

Thanks to the voters and to Joe Avalon at CWi for hosting the poll. Thanks also to John David Hoptak for cuing me to the results (Yankee huzzah?).

Kickstarting the oh-seven

3 January 2007

This humble blog is off to a flash-bang start in 2007, thanks to you – the Reader of the Year.

9rules logo

A big ‘hello’ to all my new brothers and sisters at the 9rules Network and to all the people who have already found this blog through the network. Over the last couple of years 9rules has become an excellent place to discover high value blogs, on all sorts of subjects. I’m glad to now be a part of that dynamic community. And yes, there are nine rules behind the name. I identify most closely with #4: Simple is Beautiful.

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A big shout-out also to Harry Smeltzer for his excellent article on Civil War blogs in the current issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

ACW March 2007 Cover top

Although there are dozens of fine ACW blogs out there–most better than mine–Harry made me and this blog look particularly good. Very nice press. Thanks Harry!

So … another big ‘howdy’ to the readers who are joining us as a result of that piece. It’s good to see all the new faces.

To all our readers: I hope you’ll find something you can use and enjoy here, and that you’ll feel free to comment often and let me know what you think.

Thanks again and happy New Year to all of us!

This past week I was reminded of a website maintenance chore I’ve been neglecting. An observant and sympathetic reader noted our link to the Meade Archive was broken because the site had moved. This kind of thing happens all the time, of course.

Cross-linking to other information is the best thing about the Web, but also its Achilles’ heel. Sites move, change, and disappear at an alarming rate. I have, at this point, thousands of links from within AotW to other sites. If there were dozens or even a hundred, I might be able to click on them every three months or so, to check to see that they still work.

Xenu button

Since that’s not practical, I depend on a lovely little automatic tool called the Xenu Link Sleuth (review w/screenshots). It’s a Windows desktop program–written by Tilman Hausherr–that runs through the site checking every link and reporting results. It’s quite fast, and also free. I’ve using it for 4 or 5 years now, and recommend it highly.

Xenu produces a variety of reports to show broken links, redirects, and other link issues. You can control how deeply Xenu spiders your site, include or exclude directories, and configure the reports to meet your needs. Very easy.

Word to the wise for our new digital historians: check those links, prevent link rot. ‘Course, now that I’ve done my first check in about a year, I have a huge pile of issues to chase down and resolve.

It’s not all glamor and glitz, you know.

Horn, tooting one’s own

21 October 2006

Public thanks are overdue to Bill Turkel for the flattering profile on his blog, Digital History Hacks. He makes me and AotW look really good, and finds the things of which I’m most proud from the last ten years online — in two paragraphs. Hail Turkel.

Of course, now the pressure is on me to step it up …

PHP + database + webserver

12 October 2006

In a previous post I talked about how an aspiring digital historian might learn some fundamental software technologies applicable to building a dynamic website. Today I’ll try to better explain how those work together to produce web pages.

In the simplest kind of website, a person using a browser requests an HTML page by clicking a link or typing a URL. The browser then sends that request across the great wide internet to a webserver–a specialized kind of software program living on a network server. The webserver finds the requested HTML file on it’s filesystem and returns it to the requesting browser. The browser interprets the HTML and displays the resulting page on the user’s screen.

Antietam on the Web (AotW), and many other sites, however, need more sophisticated functions than can be provided by plain old HTML. In our case we’ve chosen a combination of tools including PHP and a mySQL database to help get the job done.

PHP+database+webserver flowchart_small

I’ve been having conversations with someone who wants to put masses of historical information on the web. He’s passionate about the material, but has no experience with web technology. and doesn’t have an IT shop or a CHNM or other academic resources available. He has a late-model Windows PC at home, and is pretty good in Word.

The structure I use for AotW and recommend for similar projects is built with open source (i.e., free) parts including an apache webserver running on linux, a mySQL database, a little XHTML, and a set of PHP scripts and templates. These are widely used, readily available, and trustworthy tools for this kind of work.

the dummy

Warning: there’s no getting around it. You will need to learn some basic programming to build such a site, but it shouldn’t be too frightening. This stuff is pretty easy. 10 years ago I was a webnoob, too. If I can do it …

In this first installment*, I identify some basic web technologies you’ll need to learn, and point to some resources.

New blog address

23 September 2006

If you link to this blog, please change the URL to https://behind.aotw.org/

If you subscribe to the RSS feed, please update the feed path.

If you arrived here by the old address — aotw.org/blog/ — you may see some broken images or other odd behavior. Click on the blog title or any post link on the right to come into the new scheme.

I realize I’ve broken permalinks to previous posts here, and I’m sorry for the inconvenience. I hope to have figured out a mod_rewrite redirect soon to catch those. Any apache or wordpress gurus out there who can help me with that?

More fun with APIs

22 August 2006

After playing with the Timeline API last week, and having reasonable success, I thought I’d try another widget this week.

As a result, AotW now has another new feature: a Gazetteer for the Maryland Campaign of 1862. Please go try it and let me know what you think.

AOtW screenshot of Gazetteer map
AotW Gazetteer screenshot

My gazetteer is an index of towns, structures, and geographic features–about 70 places so far–most often mentioned in the literature of the Campaign. Some are archaic names not found on modern maps, some are just hard to find. All are listed as links below a lovely GoogleMap.

Click a name on the list and we plot and center the location on the map.

I don’t intended this map to supplant the campaign or battle maps already on AotW. But I expect this would be a useful tool for someone trying to follow the action reading a book or other document on the campaign. Or someone planning a trip to the area, and plotting places to see. Or looking at the relationships between two or more points of interest.

Each location is (or will eventually be) tagged with additional information and links to associated events or people. This information is presented as a pop-up window on demand.

The map behaves in the ways you’d expect of a Google Map, so I hope it will be easy, even intuitive, to use.

I have been accumulating geo-data for towns and features in the AotW database for some time now, not knowing exactly how to use it. With the Google Maps API it was a fairly simple leap to put these places on a map. I’d like eventually to make more sophisticated use of both the data and the mapping API, but for now I’m happy with this fairly specific function.

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Techno-comments

  • The Google Maps API is well documented and supports/is supported by a huge community of developers and other users. There’s plenty of help out there.
  • I was up most of last Sunday night making all this work. Went round and round and round … the final code looks trivial to me now, but it wasn’t automatic.
  • Like Perl, there are many ways to code something in Javascript. It turns out, also, that some of the Google calls I needed are “undocumented” and others did not work as I thought they should. Being open to trial-and-error and cribbinglearning from what others have done were key for me here.
  • I’m not blaming Google or Javascript for my difficulties, per se. I hate Javascript, but it’s me, not it. Google is doing great things in this arena – my thanks to them.
  • I used PHP code to pull the locations and geo-data from the database and write the Javascript used to invoke the API and its functions. I pass data between the html and the map on the link URLs. A little fat, perhaps, but effective. I tried several other methods. Too hard.
  • If you view-source on my Javascript, please comment by private email and save me the public embarrassment, won’t you?

I heard it said that there isn’t enough interaction on our blogs. Too few comments. I must admit to you that I’ve had just over 1,100 comments submitted in the last month, and not shown them to you. I apologize. My protective filtering software, by Akismet, has been blocking them.

Let me make this up to the contributors who wanted to say something, but couldn’t. I’ll post their thoughts now. I can do this fairly easily because, remarkably, hundreds of commenters used exactly the same phrases. But then, how many ways are there to compliment a simple blogger?

I'm really impressed!
Great job, webmaster! Nice site.
May we exchange links with your site?
Best site I see. Thanks.
I just don't have anything to say right now.
Thanks for interesting informations and good luck.
Beautiful online information center. greatest work¦ thanks.
Hello Jane, great site!
I like your site
Your home page its great.
So interesting site, thanks!
HI! I love this place!
i try to find something at google.com and take it on your site¦thanks
Nice site!
Great work!
Thank you!

and my favorite

Your site is very cognitive. I think you will have good future.:)

Who wouldn’t appreciate this kind of support from their readers?

I also thank these nice people for submitting all those links and suggestions about pharmaceuticals, intimate relationships, texas hold-em, and extra income. I’m sure these are all valuable references. It’s a shame the filter won’t let them through.

I wish there was something I could do.

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More

New Timeline for AotW

7 August 2006

A couple of weeks ago, one of my favorite Internet-friends, Andrew Vande Moere*, mentioned the Simile Timeline API in a post on his information aesthetics blog. Timeline is described by its creators as …

… a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information … Pan the timeline by dragging it horizontally … like Google Maps, you can populate Timeline with data by pointing it to an XML file …

This weekend I finally had a little time to see what it can do, and found it’s great fun.

It is one of those rare, beautiful little software gems with a clear purpose and excellent execution.

The documentation is crap–beyond the basic installation–but that’s just a quibble. Perhaps I can help improve the docs later. It’s also a bit slow in loading events and misbehaves sometimes in IE. Another quibble. For now, I’ll have fun discovering all the controls and features by dint of ‘reverse engineering’ or trial and error. And I prefer Firefox anyway.

So, perhaps obviously, I’ve made use of this fine tool for a new Campaign Timeline on AotW. Give it a spin, won’t you, and provide some constructive criticism? I think it has huge potential.

screen shot: timeline
AotW timeline screenshot

I’ve seeded my timeline with content from the 200-odd battlefield historical tablets. I used those events because I’d already transcribed them in the database, and had serendipitously included time stamps for each as I did the data entry. The timeline application reads events from an xml file, so it wasn’t too difficult to write some php code to extract and write the xml from a tailored Events table in my database.

Now, un/fortunately, I can hear hundreds of other 1862 events calling out to me.

Add me! Add me!

Yet another hungry project mouth to feed.
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* Vande Moere finds people using the most incredibly creative and useful ways to display information and pops them up on his blog. As a closet Tuftean, I’m a big fan. Usually, however cool, I can see no good way to use these amazing techniques. Until now. Thank you Andrew.

In Googling keywords mit, simile, and timeline, looking for other people using the Timeline API (hoping for clues to customizing it) I found about 200 unique references. Only about 10 of these are actual users. Everybody else is just talking about how cool it is. I wonder when/if web timelines built on this will be common?