Choosing Platforms and Methods Day To Day

Looking forward to the work in Manchester but these are decisions I have to make fairly regularly and sometimes I make them as much on expediency as anything else.

This week I met with a small group "FRIENDS OF REDCAR CEMETERY". Contrary to what you might expect we had a few laughs.

What they want to do is (a) create a virtual tour of the cemetery (b) be able to show this offline and (c) create a database of all the graves. (d) they also have a print newsletter produced in MS publisher which could go online but I think they could simply blog the stories.

I can see immediately how I would set this up. An aerial view of the cemetery with hotspot links to permalinks in an A to Z blog of details of the occupants of each grave (they have discovered 15 unmarked graves of children !) Google map definition is not good enough but I know where I can get aerial views.

Next we hit the expedience factor. I can set them up with open source blogging. However the image mapping (HTML coordiantes on a JPG) are a little limited. The simplest solution is FRONTPAGE. I know its hated but it has to be simple for the folks I'm working with. Also I dont want to have to create two versions for online and offline and I've tested adobe acrobat writer on the concept and it would grab a website with links from the image map to dymnamic content and present it as static content for projection and presentation.

I think this would be really cool. The powers that be have turned them down on acess to grave info (obviously cos they can sell these details) but if this group presented the info in a searchable way they'd get hits from bods searching Family History and I expect they'd get comments from around the globe.