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.

Robbery at Hansen's

Hansen's was robbed last Friday at closing time. You can read details about it in the Times-Picayune article "Coldblooded character sticks up snowball stand". Everyone is fine, just a little shaken.

Sno-Bliz gets blogged

Here are some posts about Hansen's Sno-Bliz from the past two months or so:

In Praise of the Sno-Ball by Edward Branley

New Thing #86: Josiah's Own by Lauren Elizabeth

Picture Perfect...Summertime Fun by Tallulah

Southern Belly: Hansen's Sno Bliz in New Orleans by John T. Edge, posted by Ed Levine

NOLA Travelogue: Parasol’s and Hansen’s Sno-Bliz by Pontchartrain Pete

Taste of New Orleans by Thy Tran

Who Dat?! A Wedding in New Orleans… by Keri Doolittle

What A Weekend by Miss Dante'

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:

Two days of scanning

I've spent the past two days at Hansen's Sno-Bliz scanning photographs and other items. So far we have a total of 49 digitized items, 40 of them photographs. All photograph and text items are being scanned in 24 bit color and at 400 ppi using a Brother MFC-465CN scanner.

For some reason the scanner is tinting everything slightly red, although the amount of red tint seems to vary. I made sure that my monitor was well calibrated, but it still happens, so I'm pretty sure it's not my monitor. I'm getting good at color correcting for red.

The process generally goes like this: place photograph on scanner which already has the color bar on it (add the grey scale color bars to scanner if it is a black and white photo). From the Photoshop file menu open "Brother TWAIN", pre-scan the image, select the area to scan, wait for image to scan. Immediately save tiff version of image as preservation copy. Color correct photo using eyes and color bar, rotate image so that it is straight, crop down to just around image. Save as tiff access copy. Catalogue image as best as possible (including measurements of original photo).

I'm getting pretty fast at this. I scanned 26 photographs today (and I even took a break to have a Cream of Ice Cream snoball).

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.