The Northern Virginia Digital History Archive

The Northern Virginia History Archive is an experimental project that was created by Professor Charlie Evans to collect digital media related to the history and the transformation of northern Virginia.  One of the biggest strengths of the site is that it is light and responsive.  Its retrospective style also gives visitors a nostalgic feeling when visiting the site.  The website encourages user contributions by allowing visitors to upload their contents onto the archive.  It also has a quality control feature that allows the site administrators to review the content that is being uploaded first before it gets published.  In sacrifice for simplicity and responsiveness, the tools available for contributors are limited.  Users won't be able to rotate or crop images through the website, all of that has to be done beforehand.

Very much like Professor Evans, I am also attempting to build a historical website with a topic that is related to northern Virginia, perhaps focusing on the history of the Northern Virginia Community College (NVCC).  Although NVCC offers free web-hosting for its students, NVCC servers are notorious for being out of service due to regular maintenance.  I am planning to utilize Joomla, a free open-source content management system, to build this new website.  Joomla requires some PHP configurations and access to MySQL.  Web-hosting support from NVCC can be slow and bureaucratic, and access to database features may also be limited for students.  A good website is a team effort, therefore responsive support from the web-hosting side is just as crucial as good planning and designing from the developer side.  Although this project is a short-term experimental website, it is also a class assignment that is going to be graded.  This project can be migrated to another host or discarded after its purpose is fulfilled; however, it neede to be up and running smoothly during evaluation.  I feel more confident to approach this project using a commercial web-hosting service that is responsive when it comes to support and does not require a long-term commitment.

Complex websites that interact with database and are tied to other third party plugins can easily break if a component is not configured properly.  For this reason I always create a cloned twin used for experimental purposes.  Think of this cloned twin as a stunt-double.  When something goes wrong with the cloned twin while tweaking with features or configurations, I know not to repeat the same mistakes on the actual website.

Digitizing history is a labor-intensive process.  A successful project requires a lot of technical know-how and a small team of specialists, from coding to design.  One of the most important elements of all is passion.  Without it, one could easily be drained and burnout in the process.

Comments

  1. Professor Charles EvansJuly 5, 2017 at 4:36 AM

    Really looking forward to your work with Joomla! And the kinds of materials that you'll be able to locate and use for your website.

    ReplyDelete

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