I spent a significant amount of time over the years working on the Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan website. It just relaunched yesterday after undergoing a significant redesign. Sadly most of the work I put into this over the years has now faded away, but I still get a mention in the site credits (very gracious of them), and it’s a significant improvement over the old site. It also made the news on Bowdoin’s site, where you can read a puff piece on the site’s history. Of course they don’t cover the aspects that are of interest to me, which in brief are: how the original designer envisioned it as a frame-based site, which didn’t actually work and led me to develop it as a dhtml-based site back in the era of netscape 4. This was a constant challenge to keep updated as the browser wars and dhtml/javascript evolved. How I later worked with Kevin and others to move it to a data backed (all xml) and flash front end design which, while a bit clunky, did work really well. How Kevin discovered, by accident, a fantastic set of woodcut copies of the scrolls which even the scholar was unaware of, and how I worked to get that in-house at Bowdoin (they cost a couple of hundred $$$ and were very rare. Ultimately the scholar managed to acquire them). Those materials now inform the site’s presentation more than any of the other original materials. Also due to politics they’re not able to talk about who originally helped conceive of the approach we took to this site, namely my old boss, Peter Schilling, now at Wagner.edu.

None of this is really sour grapes (though were I Peter, I’d be thinking the grapes are in fact rather sour), but being a geek I do find that stuff more interesting than most of the material in the Bowdoin news story. I’m hardly john q. public though.

Anyway the site is well worth a look. Great use of flash, interesting subject matter, and you’ll even learn something to boot. Check it out.