Creating the Online Archive

Week 8

Given the reservations I had last week about creating the online site, I devoted most of this week to that effort. After a presentation to my boss and a follow-up conversation with Sophia, during which I expressed my reservations about using my company’s product for the site, Sophia and I decided it would be better to move forward with a Word Press site (RFPL already uses Word Press for their website). As I don’t have any experience with Word Press, I had a fair amount of research to do. I must admit that despite my computer background, I was surprised by how unprepared I was for working with Word Press!

Fortunately, https://wordpress.org provides a phenomenal amount of support for beginners. I took full advantage of their extensive document guides, and those, combined with my own computer skills, helped me move forward. I created a locally hosted Word Press site, and began to configure it to meet my needs. I converted the default blog into a website, and began to play around with the themes. I wanted to match my site to RFPL’s existing site, but I soon realized that RFPL had actually paid for their site’s theme, which I didn’t want to do. However, I did manage to configure a free theme to match the look of the RFPL’s site almost exactly. By the end of the week, I had the skeleton of my site, and had even begun uploading the scans of the photo albums to the site to see how those images would look.

It was at this point I ran into an issue. I realized that the scanner I had been using only sends me files in PDF format, while Word Press can only display images on their site in .jpeg format. The PDF files would link to the site, but they wouldn’t display automatically. This meant, unfortunately, that I would have to convert all of my PDF files into .jpg images. For the photo album scans, it’s not a problem, as I have to manipulate (ie crop, rotate, etc.) all the files in Adobe anyway (which I also started to do this week). Saving them as .jpeg files is only an extra step (assuming you have the very expensive version of Adobe that lets you do that…which fortunately I have access to). However, when I get to the documents that don’t require manipulation in Adobe, the conversion will be an additional, time-consuming step. Despite this, however, I am now confident moving forward with Word Press.