Online Exhibit Receiving Attention

Since the launch of the Online Exhibit last week, snobliz.com has been noticed by local news sources.

Today an article came out in the Times-Picayune called Hansen's Sno-Blog.

Last week, the Blog of New Orleans (part of the Gambit) made a post about the website and online exhibit.

Online Exhibit Live

I am very excited to announce that the Sno-Bliz Online Exhibit is now live. The Online Exhibit is a a collection of Hansen's Sno-Bliz memorabilia, including photographs, signs, articles, and video.

You can also check out and comment on some of our photographs on our Flickr account and our videos on YouTube.

So Close

I am so close to launching the Online Exhibit I can almost taste it. As of right now, all of the pages on the site look and behave the way I want them to. I just have a few technical details to work out and some text to polish.

Uploading items to the exhibit is going well. I'm figuring out some pretty cool tricks that I can do with OpenCollection.

I've also run ABBY Fine Reader 8 (an OCR program) on many of the articles and other documents and created PDFs (with mostly clean OCR) for many of them which I'm including in the Exhibit.

If all goes well, I plan to launch the Online Exhibit on Tuesday.

I also decided to simplify my cataloging. I realized that it did not make sense to separate letters from paper documents, so I folded them into the paper documents category. I've updated my Naming Schema to reflect this.

Online Exhibit Preparation Update

I have now gotten both OpenCollection and OpenCollectionAccess (a nice front end for OpenCollection) working on the site. I figured out how to add metadata elements, including Dublin Core. I also figured out lots of other things about how to organize stuff in OpenCollection, which I hope will add ease of browse and functionality to the Online Exhibit.

I also started working on changing the look of OpenCollectionAccess to what I want the Online Exhibit to look like, with some help from my friend Jesse. My friend Maggie pointed out that I need to make sure that the Online Exhibit is obviously a different place than the main site. I think that one of the ways to do this (other than my plan for a top nav and a different break in space for the nav) is to make the roll-over color for images different. The idea is that the color will be the roll over color for "Online Exhibit" on the main site and the "Main Site" link on the Online Exhibit will be blue. I'm thinking about going with a green, since so much of OCA already uses a green color and green is a good sno-ball color. So, the final product will probably look something like this (but I think the green will be darker):

I've uploaded and catalogued about 20 images so far. I even re-purposed one of the OC fields to link to a Flickr image of the object, and only show up on display if I've uploaded the image to Flickr. And I figured out how to make Flickr link back to the Online Exhibit. I'm really excited about this as I hope people will use either Flickr or email to let us know more about the pictures that we know almost nothing about.

As of right now, everything is locked up because I don't want people seeing an unfinished product. I hope to be able to launch everything in a week to a week and a half.

Main site live

I am happy to announce that the entirety of the main Hansen's Sno-Bliz website has gone live. On it you can now find hours, directions, a list of flavors, and a brief history of the snoball stand.

The Online Exhibit is not live yet, but will be coming in the next few weeks.

OpenCollection

After almost a week of trying to figure out everything that needed to be done to start running OpenCollection on SnoBliz.com, it is finally working. Now I can get to the fun part - uploading and cataloging everything that I digitized last month and setting up the Online Exhibit to look just how I want it to. I'm really excited about this. I currently have the directory hidden, but as soon as I get it where I want it, I'll make it public.

A huge thanks to Jen and Thomas at drak.net, Seth at OpenCollection.org, and my really good friend Jesse Martinez. I couldn't have done this with out all of y'all.

Scanning done

I finished scanning everything yesterday. I have the exact totals at my finger tips, but I ended up scanning on site 1 cup design, a few letters/short-stories/poems, several business documents (like business cards and gift certificates), about 70 photographs, and 5 articles from magazines or newspapers (one was 12 pages long). I also took a bunch of digital photography for the website and the fun of it. I wasn't able to take shots for a QTVR panorama because I didn't have a tripod. But I hope to be able to make one for them at some point in the future (if one doesn't get made for this project).

I finalized the main website design and am mostly done building the whole thing on a test server. I still need to get content from Ashley.

Also, I mocked up a look for the online exhibit part of the site. I like it and Ashley does too.

Online Exhibit Version 1:

Site design again

Ok, after talking with Ashley and our designer and thinking about the flow of information, here is my most recent version of the website design.

Version 6a


I changed the name of "archive" to "online exhibit" because FA2 pointed out that while archive is a trendy term, online exhibit is more accurate. I also decided to move the memorial page to a special page of the online exhibit, so we can easily use scanned pictures of Mary and Ernest Hansen. I also added a Contact page that will have more detailed information than what is in the footer. I decided that with these changes only one box was needed to contain them.

Furthermore, I changed the border from the little snoballs (which really wasn't working) to a rounded edged rectangular section border. I've decided that I am much happier with that than with the snoballs. I also changed the color of "Hansen's Sno-Bliz" to the same pink as the default nav color. It's subtle, but I like it.

Prep-week update

This has been a busy first full week on this project. I spent most of it doing prep work so that once I get started, everything will run smoothly.

I have met with archivists from Loyola, Tulane, and Historic New Orleans to see if they are interested in the collection and if the collection would be a good fit. I hope to have the archivists from Loyola and HNO come look at what we have before making a recommendation to Ashley.

Ashley and I also met with a graphic designer to talk about logos, design, and branding. She's going to take a look at the website design, so I hope that she has some good suggestions for me soon.

I also spent a lot of time setting up things so that I can start really working on stuff. I helped Ashley purchase equipment both for the shop and for this project and then set it all up so that it works on both of our computers (we both use Macs, which makes everything really easy).

As part of testing some of the new equipment, I scanned my first photo for this project. This is a very young Ashley making a snoball with her grandmother Mary and father Jerry watching. The color is somewhat off. I ordered a set of color bars from Adorama.com, but they won't come in until next week. I may rescan the photo after they come in.

I am currently in the process of setting up the backend of the website. Furthermore, I started a Flickr account and a Hansen's Sno-Bliz Flickr Group, which already has a few members. I've added a widget to this blog to display random photos from the group.

I have also started thinking about metadata and file naming conventions for the online exhibit.

The next step is to start going through the collection and select fun things to digitize.

Capstone thoughts

I will be heading to New Orleans next week to get officially started on my Capstone. During this time I hope to meet with people from the archives I've been in contact with, meet with the graphic designer to help design the look of the web pages, figure out the web hosting for snobliz.com, and pick out items for the prototype online exhibit.

For the online exhibit, I talked with Fac. Advisor the other day about a scope for the prototype and this is what we agreed on (all numbers are approximate:

• A variety of 50 images including (but not limited to)
  • A few celebrity photos
    
  • One or two transparencies of cup designs
    
  • A few photos from Post-hurricanes
    
  • Some from of the store itself
    
  • Regular customers in the shop
• One or two oversized laminated collages
  
• 10 old newspaper articles
  
• A small sample of audio and visual material (amount depends on length)
  
• A few QuickTime VR shots (one of interior of store, maybe one of flavor bottle)

I'm really excited about this project. I need to figure out how to acquire a set of color bars for scanning purposes and a tripod attachment for QTVR shots.

Two more designs

After talking with my capstone advisor about the design, he proposed the idea of having the nav bar only on the left, so I tried it.

Version 5a: Same breakup of nav as before, all on the left.


Version 5b: Nav on the left, second box broken up into two boxes.


After looking at both of these, I still think I like Version 4 better.

Final design?

I think I am finally happy with the basic site design! After talking with friends and doing the environmental scan, I decided to make it much more "fun" looking.

Design Version 4 (hopefully final, minus small tweaks)

Environmental Scan

Since I'm still not happy with the website design, I've decided to do an environmental scan to see what else is out there for snowball stand websites. I couldn't really find any, so I broadened my search to ice cream stands as well. The criteria that I had was that the site had to be for a pure stand (not ice cream + tourist or farm or something like that) and the site was not done in flash.

Snowcone stands:

• Plum Street Snoballs - not a very well done site.

New Orleans Ice Cream Stands:

• Brocatos - Really pulls in their color scheme nicely, but more about their mail-order business than the store
• Creole Creamery - Good site, wish it was centered instead of left aligned. I like that they have all the flavors listed. Address and hours at the bottom of site is nice. Also like the that the ice cream cones are aligned left and the words are aligned right, also wraps text which looks nice and is, in fact, very readable. Fun and young looking.

Ice Cream Stands elsewhere:

• Buttonwood Farm Ice Cream - Like that they have a calendar. Don't like that the side pictures take forever to load and that the navigation is not carried through from page to page. Looks more "businessy" than ice cream-ish
• Gifford's Ice Cream - Love the "old time" look for the logo and menu and site in general. Expanding menu...don't think I'll need it, but I like the way they break up the information about the business. Also have a section for press releases.
• Gray's Ice Cream - Very simple site. Map to stand.

Points to take away from all of this (and other thoughts)

• Make sure site conveys the nature of the business. Is too "businessy" right now. Make it more fun.
• Having a list of flavors is not only a good idea, it's industry standard for this type of site
• Calendar - either list constant hours somewhere or have a calendar. Look into embedding one from Google - makes it more dynamic/easy to update
• Links page or press-releases page for articles that are on the web already.
• Link to this blog?
• Change hours to hours & location and include a map (from Google maps?)

Well, that's a lot to think about. Time to rework some stuff, now that I have some better ideas. I'll add more sites to the list if I come across any.

Home page design version 3

After talking with Ashley, I came up with a modification to the site design, mostly having to do with the logo. I found a font that is very close to the Hansen's logo on their tee-shirts and am now going to be using that. I'm debating if I want the navigation menus in the same font.

Version 3.1

Home page designs

I've been working on the home page design. I have a basic concept, but am trying to refine the details. Here are the different versions I have so far. I'm partial to version 2, although none of the permutations of it are completely satisfying to me. All images open to larger versions in a new tab/window.

Version 1.5a (large title and menu, delineations of space with straight black lines):


Version 1.5b (large title and menu, delineations of space with black lines, menus in a box):


Version 2.1 (small title and menu, delineations of space with straight black lines):


Version 2.2 (small title and menu, delineations of space with straight grey lines):


Version 2.3 (small title and menu, delineations of space with straight grey lines, lines are slightly thicker with a bit of shape to them):

I also thought about lining up the images in the side menus, but I'm not sure about it.

First Post

This blog was created as part of a Capstone experience for the School of Information at the University of Texas Austin. The goal of the Capstone is two fold: 1. Create a website for Hansen's Sno-Bliz and 2. Create a prototype of an online archive of Hansen's Sno-Bliz memorabilia. The second part of this project is going to be the more extensive and difficult part, but hopefully the end will be rewarding.

I am going to be using this space to hash out ideas and give updates about the project. Hopefully, it will one day also be used to provide news about goings on at Hansen's, links to news articles about the business, interesting addtions to the archive, and the like.