Done and Done (or at least for now).

At last, it is done.  I’ve uploaded my final project, which turned out to be pretty darn tedious on the coding side.

I began the project by putting up a paper I wrote last semester on Henriette Caillaux’s trial, which took place in Paris just weeks prior to the beginning of World War I.  I drew heavily from the newspaper coverage of the trial and seeing as I had digital copies of all the newspapers I used for my research, I thought it would be interesting to include them alongside my analysis.  Because the newspapers are so large, even when uploaded to Scribd’s iPaper, it really wasn’t feasible to include the newspapers side by side with my text.  Instead, I’ve put each paper I reference on a separate page with a link in the main body as well as in the footnotes.  I found some JavaScript online that would allow me to essentially create a back button on my newspaper webpage.  Because the same newspaper may be referenced multiple times throughout the paper, the JavaScript allows the reader to return to the exact place they were after viewing the newspaper.

While I’m happy with how everything turned out, I know it’s not “perfect.”  I’m having a few spacing issues with the pictures.  I don’t like how much margin is left between each imbedded image and the text, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to change that. I’ve played with all my margins, padding, etc, and still no luck.  The mysteries of CSS.  Also, the latter half of the paper relies heavily on images taken from the newspapers.  Some of these images are pretty small on the site and I’d like to add a hover option so the reader can see some of the details.  I’m also thinking about adding a table of contents that acts as a title page to the project.  If I end up doing this, I’ll have a link back to the table of contents on each page.  I’m debating if this will help with navigation or if it would encourage the reader to move through my paper out of order.  I wrote it to be read from start to finish and I’m not sure I want to make it easy for someone to jump around.

Well, at any rate, I’m done with it for now.  If it changes in the next few days, you will know that I was feeling rather ambitious.