behind AotW

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.

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/
Nicol?ɬ°s Quiroga ‚Äú Tapera ‚Äú 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.