Thinking About Doing a Site on a Past Event

[Grady Joslin]

Over the past two years, I've been heavily researching and collecting anything I can find on April 3, 1974. Over these years I have collected over 5-6 booklets, couple sets of photos, newspapers, and other various items and I have learned so much about this event that is has changed my entire view of storm chasing and help started me down the path of Emergency Management. This was the single event that literally surrounded where I live in Jeffersonville, Indiana.

Here's the thing, I do not want to keep this information to myself. I would like for others to learn about this event. April 3, 1974 to me is literally the 70's 9/11. So many communities effected over such a vast area. The part that is troubling me is I am not sure which medium to present this information.

I have been toying around with the idea of using Wordpress and creating a website, another idea was creating an interactive flash site (however I am not that familiar with Flash), or maybe there is another platform all together I haven't thought of.

I was curious to what you guys would think would be the best platform for creating such a site?

 

[Wes Carter]

Personally, I'm sold on Wordpress because it is so easy to set up, add content, and there are plugins for everything you can think of. If you can imagine it, you can probably do it in Wordpress.

 

[TJ Whitt]

Grady! I'll second that on using Wordpress.

 

[MatthewCarman]

If you want you can make a article about this event on chaserpedia or wikipedia. That way more people would see it. If you still want to make your own site for this event you can always keep the info on the wiki's more basic and save the advanced stuff for your site. You could also start a thread here at stormtrack and get other members stories and info for that event.

I have a friend who lived in Ohio when that event happened. He and his family had to hide in the basement as a very strong and violent F4 tornado moved through the area. I always thought the super outbreak was interesting.

 

[Skip Talbot]

This sounds like it could be a valuable resource. Wordpress works quite well for blogs. I'm worried though that you are going to wind up with just a jumbled bunch of articles in which it will be difficult to find anything. Ideally some sort of site with a hierarchically organization would be nice, but I'm not sure which of the content management systems would be best for the off the top of my head since I usually make my websites by hand. I know you can tag posts with Wordpress so they are organized into groups, but then how do you organize the articles in the lists. Wordpress and blogs in general are great for catchign up on the latest musings, but they are real bear to work with when trying to navigate them or find something in particular.

 

[Grady Joslin]

Thank you all for your suggestions. I've still be toying around with ideas on what I been wanting to do. Skip as for Wordpress I thought about it too because I do love it. But your right, I could wind up with a mess of articles. However, I've been looking at drupal more and more now. I am also getting ready to do a research paper on the event as well for school on regards of communication failures of the time during the event and how they have improved today. Right now I am letting the site idea simmer for bit before I settle on something.

I did pull out my collection today looking at it and decided to take a picture of it.

I think now I am going to start working on an outline to what I want the site to start out as. I am also worried about copyrights as well. I am not wanting to post every bit claiming its mine, its not. In fact I want to give everyone who worked on what they did credit, however I am going to be left contacting several publishing places asking permission. One friend suggested is do more like a "research" paper and reference them. For right now I am going to start figuring out how I want to do it.

One more note before I close out, there is an event coming up in Meade County, KY (Brandenburg) on April 1st about 1974. I am planning on going and I am hoping I get to meet some of the survivors as well. It should be a very interesting experience which I am looking forward to.