From my diary

I’ve continued to add a few photographs of Mithraic monuments, with their entry in the CIMRM, to the new Mithras site, The Roman cult of Mithras.  It’s become increasingly clear that the approach that I have been following with these is not quite right.  What I have at the moment is one web-page per monument.

You have to attempt some things before you really understand what you’re trying to do.  It’s become clear to me, for instance, that much of what I do when I add a photograph is repetitive, and the process of generating the page for the CIMRM entry is one that could be automated, and therefore should be.  I need to write a wizard to do the uploads, much like that in Wikimedia Commons, but targeted at my special process.  That will help.

But one page per monument doesn’t work.  The value of having this material is the ability to skim over it easily, to get an overview, to understand common features between dozens of images.  With a click per image, and a couple of thousand entries, this isn’t going to work.

Obviously I need some kind of image gallery, like that in Wikimedia Commons, or Google Images.  I was thinking of generating a thumbnail (using ImageMagick) as part of the upload wizard, and then using the wizard, not only to create the web page, but also to add an entry to the gallery.  That still seems like a good idea.

But it occurred to me just now … image gallery scripts must already exist.  Can’t I adapt one somehow?  It’s worth looking into.  A task for tomorrow, perhaps.

The material must be accessible.  We see so many academic sites where it is quite clear that the designer never stopped for a moment, imagined what a user might want to do on the site, and then reflected on how to make that easiest to do.  I don’t want to do this myself.

One other thing that I need to fix on the site.  I’ve got to make it easier to add Greek text!