behind AotW

Writing previously on this subject, I worried about a soldier’s wartime letter disappearing into a private collection, never to be seen again. That was as nothing compared to what I found online today. Oh how I wish now I’d gone for the money instead of personal satisfaction and life-balance in my career choices.

Cowan Auctions is selling a mass of Americana on November 16th. There are some truly magnificent finds for the student of the American Civil War listed in the catalog. This looks like a wide array of archives and artifacts.

I’d be overjoyed if collectors of historical ephemera would publish online, or loan to museums, or at least make scans or transcriptions of their treasures available to the rest of us. In the meantime, I’m snatching digital samples related to Antietam and the Campaign as they go by.

After a little more research, I expect to use some of this material on AotW:

W.W. Blackmar

I have a special fascination with Medal of Honor recipients. One I’d not previously associated with the Maryland Campaign is Captain Wilmon Whilldin Blackmar of Boston. That’s him above, from a gilt-framed CDV, part of Lot 232 (est. $3,000-4,000). Blackmar

… enlisted as Corporal in Company K, 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry in August 1862. The novice regiment participated in the Maryland campaign before transferring west to join the Army of the Cumberland in December 1862 …

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No more fooling with theory and generalities. Its time to get started with your new web project. How better to learn?

Off we go, then.

We’ll start with a very simple, single-page project. We’ll get the development server up and running and use it to demonstrate how the XHTML, PHP, and database components work together, in more concrete terms. This will not, I hope, turn into an extended tutorial, there are plenty of those already out there, but this will give you a starting point for noodling around on your own.

Step 1: Install the XAMPP package on your home PC

Download the basic package - the 33 MB Installer [MD5] version. Ignore the Devel and Upgrade packages, and the Add-Ons. Do the full installation, and say “yes” to all the defaults. This will only take a few minutes. When finished, the following structure, very similar to that which you’ll use on your hosting service’s box, will be in place:

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.

You probably already know Jenny Goellnitz from her Civil War work on the web, notably on the Wheatfield at Gettysburg, troops of Ohio at Gettysburg, Federal Colonel Strong Vincent, and Confederate surgeon Hunter McGuire. Her magnum opus is And Then A.P. Hill Came Up, the premier internet source on the Confederate General.

Goellnitz photos: Dunker Church, Burnside Bridge, Guns at Sharpsburg

Jenny recently returned from a trip to Sharpsburg and added an excellent virtual tour of the battlefield to the A.P. Hill site. Take a look; she’s done a fine overview of the field and the day, with pieces of the Park’s driving tour map and some very nice photographs of her own in accompaniment.

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.

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.