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.

So to speak. I spent more than my last year at Bowdoin working towards a complete redesign of the college’s website – not just the physical appearance, but the content authoring and editing processes, the content management system that those processes run on, the news gathering and publication process, the ‘flow chart’ of the site, the design, the software that delivered things like course listings, faculty homepages, course pages, and more. It was a TON of work, and there was a lot of sometimes very uncomfortable political and personnel issues to work through as well. We were 90% done when I left, all that remained was to actually roll it out, and I had 17 students working for me on just that (and we were mostly done, though we had done all the easy stuff first, the remaining 10% was going to be the hardest parts). Anyway after I left they submitted the site to the annual webbyawards. We didn’t win, but we did get honorable mention, which you can scope out at the webbyawards site. Despite not winning, and despite the fact that more than 100 sites got honorable mention, I’m still really proud of this. I’m also envious of my coworkers at Bowdoin, who got a 40GB ipod as a reward for their labors. I teased them about it ‘come on, where’s mine!’ and they teased me right back ‘you bailed, you get nothing!’

d’oh!

It’s all about timing. As usual mine’s no good.

Andrew, Soolin and I went hiking west of Wells, NY this Saturday. Our goal was to check out the series of falls along the West Sacandaga River, but a lack of good maps and tired legs kept us from seeing them. Still we had an excellent mostly off-trail hike and got to follow about 2 miles of a river that had been flooding the previous weekend. I got plenty of rapids and one waterfall on camera. As soon as I can get my camping gear in order I plan to head back to this region, it’s got tons of trails and is remote enough that it’s not widely known or used. In fact we saw only one other pair of hikers the whole time. Anyway check out the photos.