stanhoe.org

Flash is currently used only to play streaming audio on the sound recordings pages.

Javascript is used for the slide show on the home page, to display certain other images, to protect email addresses, for “expand/collapse” text areas, and for backend editing. All other functions should work with Javascript turned off.

All pages should be valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Please if you spot a problem.

We use a bit of proprietary CSS for curved boxes and drop shadows. We don’t see this as a big issue at the moment, but if you disagree.

Internet Explorer 6

This site does not display properly in Internet Explorer 6. Specifically, IE6 users see a large gap near the top of any page that contains photos. This became less of a problem after Norfolk’s public libraries finally upgraded to IE7 in November 2009.

Safari 4 and calendars

Mac users may have a problem viewing the embedded Google Calendars using Safari 4; in this case the “Activity” window shows the error message “Too many HTTP redirects”. This is a known bug with Google Calendars in iframes, and it’s hard to troubleshoot as it seems to be intermittent. Safari 5 seems to have fixed the problem.

Originally we hosted our images on the NORCAN website. This purpose-designed system has one or two nice features, including powerful searching and the ability to set “hotspots” within images. However, it’s opaque to the outside world (including Google) and is a black hole as far as bulk uploads and downloads go. It can’t import existing metadata, and doesn’t store full-size images.

So we also experimented with Google Picasa Web Albums. Thanks to the Picasa desktop software, this has good support for metadata, bulk transfers, backups and image editing. Searchability is rather poor, and the limit on the number of photos per album is a pain. The multi-user aspect is limited too: other users can upload and edit their own photos, but any particular image can only be edited by its owner.

We chose Gallery3 because it is simple to set up and just about meets our needs. Coppermine is another popular image management program in the same class. In due course we hope to integrate Gallery3 with CMSms to give the site a unified look.

The ideal would be a “museum-class” CMS such as Greenstone, dspace, EPrints or Fedora Commons. This would provide better searchability and support for more types of metadata, and allow us to catalogue scanned documents as PDFs with embedded text. But they are more complex to set up, and we don’t have the expertise. The would welcome any offers of help.