A Reflection

Conclusions:
        The development of  a website is a lot of work, even when the goal of the website is merely to present other people's hard work.  As Pierce Lewis exhorted us in 1985, Geographers "need to make our geographic work more accessible and attractive to the general public," and using the internet to accomplish this is an idea that is still in development as the limitations and boundaries of what is possible in the digital realm are pushed farther with each passing year.
          The course imbued a much deeper appreciation for the first world war in me.  I had very little knowledge of this conflict before the class, all I really knew was the combatants and a bit about how it affected the German psyche, esp. regarding the military which I picked up from a class on the Nazis I took some years ago.  Otherwise, my knowledge was largely confined to generalizations surrounding the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Empire, and technology that I retain from the early years of High School, now foggy.  I was never as fascinated by this fight as I am now.
          The incredible mobilizations that had to occur for this war to happen on the scale that it did are striking, and the continued maintenance of awesome memorials such as what I saw on the Somme and at Verdun, some by nations an ocean away, are nothing short of impressive.  The mental and emotional strain that this war brought on Europe can still be felt in touring these landscapes today, and having the opportunity to touch, smell and explore them for myself is doubtlessly an experience that I will carry with me and inform my thoughts for the rest of my life.

Project, Difficulties and Shortcomings:
         Our website is, for all intents and purposes, complete.  Each student's work is displayed prominently, and in a format that I think is accessible to the broader public.  The collection of interactive maps, story maps, research, analysis, and media make our experience and knowledge to an audience that we could never have hoped to reach without the incredible technologies developed in the last ten years, taking advantage of the functionality of web 2.0 in distributed GIS.
          Finding the right tone of the website (and organizing it to fit that) was a real trick for me, personally.  It took a lot of input from the class and Professor Hupy to decide on the route that we took the site.  I am satisfied with the direction we took, ultimately a site that was too academic and dry would not provide nearly the experience that we were looking for.
          Making the website something that can be found by search engines is still a work in progress, waiting for the web crawlers to pick up the entire site (some pages show up, others do not yet).  I recently added some Google Analytics to the site that will inform any further optimization for the site.  Certainly it was difficult to figure out some of the finer points of iframes and html 5 for me, not being a software developer.  I think I'll take some HTML5 classes this winter to help with that for next semester, hopefully I'm not done bringing geography to the web.

Meat and Bones: The Website Liveth!!!

It Lives

     Okay Ladies and Gents, this week we finally have some real meat to the website. What had been accomplished for last week was piddly compared to the collection of hard work that is now hosted on the class web page. Every student now has an entry on the webpage for themselves and the work that they have accomplished, complete with backgrounds, introductions, histories methods discussions and results where applicable. Some students have their web maps embedded on the site. Others, video. Some students have links to their work because that's just how Google earth works and my programming skills, I regret to admit, are too basic to embed Google earth on our site.

All that's left for this pig is the lipstick. Next week's goals: add images. The site is in desperate need of more eye candy, which with the trove of pictures collected from the trip itself and the plethora of free historical imagery available online should be easy to accomplish. Some standardization will need to occur across the student pages for consistency, some Backgrounds will need to be combined with introductions and such so that the basic formatting of each page is solid across the student section of the site.

fig 1: Ellen's page