behind AotW

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.

I received this as a comment to another post, but thought I’d repackage here in case you don’t catch it elsewhere. If you are a blogger, please give the courtesy of your undivided attention:

October / 2006

We are interested in learning more about history blogs and in finding ways to promote them. To aid in this effort, we are circulating a small questionnaire and will make the results available in Tapera (in Spanish) and in Digital History Hacks (in English). If you wish to participate, please return the questionnaire to tapera@tapera.info
Thank you very much.

William Turkel – Digital History Hacks – http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com/
Nicolás Quiroga – Tapera – http://tapera.info

Blog:
URL:
Authors:
First post (mm/dd/Y):

Questions:
1. Which history-related blogs do you visit most frequently? (1-5)
2. What factors do you think are involved in your choice of blogs to read? (For example: quality of information, writing, institution, author profile, rankings, entertainment value…)
3. What factors characterize your own blog? Which are most important?
4. Have you changed the objectives of your blog since you created it?

As I was exploring Mansfield Monument Road northeast of Sharpsburg, on the way to the upper bridge last Saturday, I passed two men, each in their own cars, stopped along the road facing the Battlefield. Looked like they were waiting for something.

I drove about 100 yards past, and stopped at the high ground on that stretch. The highest point before the land dives down a couple of more ridges to Antietam Creek about 1/2 mile east.

I got out, took my bearings–glad to see the wings of the eagle atop the New York State monument just poking over the trees about a mile and a half to the west–and tried to be William French. I looked at the map some more, put it away, and turned toward the bridge. Lost in my own, ancient place.

Who you following? a voice shouted up the road.

What? Not sure what I heard. I turned to see the two guys were striding up the hill toward me.

Following First Corps?

No, I yelled back, French’s Division, Second Corps.

I see that the home office has deployed a new standard web design for National Park sites. The Antietam National Battlefield (ANB) Park is among those with the new look. I’ve not found a formal announcement of the change by either the National Park Service (NPS) or the Park. Don’t know why not – the sites look good. This change seems to have been made between 27 July and 2 August this year. Thanks to Tom Shay for the alert on TalkAntietam.

ANBP homepage

I live in a glass house on the web, so it’s hardly wise to throw stones, but let me introduce you to the new site and how well I think it works. I’ll find an interested party at the Park to send this to, also. FWIW.

I’ve been hearing for at least three years now about a massive overhaul of the Battlefield website and contents. The current offering is no such animal. It’s more structural than content change.