You all may get a kick out of the Western Springs Newspaper Obituary Index. An industrious Magazines Desk employee was interested in indexing obits from our local papers, and naturally we wanted this index to be online. The obvoius solution was to use WordPress:
Quick and easy database creation. In fact, I didn’t have to do anything, WordPress did it all. Yay. Fully searchable.
Easy data entry This is Beth’s project, and she’s very dedicated to it. I wasn’t going to have the time to enter code myself, and there wasn’t time to show her how to write code. It took literally 4 minutes to show her how to log in, make an entry, select a category, and post.
So each ‘record’ in this database is a blog post. Categories were put in alpha order by
< ?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name'); ?>.
I had to get the posts within a category display to be in alpha order too, not the usual bloggish reverse chronological. Luckily I found this code on the WordPress forums:
< ?php if (is_category()) { $posts = query_posts($query_string . '&orderby=title&order=asc'); } ?>.
The static front page is produced by semilogic’s static front page plugin.
It isn’t the prettiest website I’ve ever seen, but it’s functional. And it’s sure a great example of how weblogs can be so darn handy.
n.b. People can’t make comments on the obit index. I wasn’t quite comfortable with giving people the opportunity to talk about the deceased. “Online Grieving @ Your Library†has an odd ring to it.
8 Comments
Newbie here. Is data portability a possibility? Say WordPress no longer is an option for you. Is it possible to transfer Beth’s obit file to another blog or other format?
John,
Yes, there are various import and export tools with most blogging systems. So nothing is locked in to the specific system, in this case.
Hey Aaron,
Where did the obit database disappear to?
Beth
I really love to read some articles that have great positive impacts on its reader and benefit by reading such article. I admire these writers in sharing their views and or opinions that can enlighten the mind of the readers.
Thanks for the ideas!
Great post! I’ll definitely be subscribing to your posts
Yeah doubtlessly very
fortunate for the students! Most of the posts in the blog
set off with adept enlightenment… Thanks for the chapter and verse! None of the writing services could give such an pass, all they can do is to make me buy essay which are not exceptional. The only thing you’ve got to comprehend trying to make an proper work is that you can buy term papers or buy research paper about whatever.
But remember, to make review about western springs newspaper obituary index is not an cinch
task. Thanks.
Yep – Wordpress is pretty cool huh? It has so much capability and is pretty easy to customize as well.
One Trackback
[...] So, LISHost had a hiccup and was restored back to Sunday’s state. Therefore, two posts here were zapped into oblivion….or not. You saw them appear again because I was able to rescue the content from blogline’s cache. I knew it was too soon for the Wayback Machine , but I knew it had to be around somewhere. Digital content never dies, right? There’ve been a few links in to the obit index post, which had to move from walkingpaper.org/309 to http://walkingpaper.org/311. Your insightful comments, however, are gone. [...]