Visualize History

For the last few days I’ve been working o the site design for Visualize History.  I think I’m done, but only because I have no more ideas.  I am horrible at design.  By design I mean graphic design, including fonts, colors, background images, and layout, and how all those things interact with each other.  I don’t know why and I’m usually frustrated to no end but the way my brain is wired does not compute design well at all.

It usually frustrates me even more because I have an intuitive feel for user interface design.  I can picture how a user will interact with my programs but not how they will look at the site.

For example, I just added a feature which shows the events for different topics in different colors.  The event was difficult to add but trivial in concept and blatantly obvious to me.  It required adding a new library and some code changes across 3 files.  It took me about 25 minutes including testing for bugs.  I spent the last two days trying to redesign the layout of the site.  The same 25 minutes got me nowhere, and in the 2 days I spent on it, I managed to add two images and change the font of my header.

I suppose that is why a programmer is not a programmer but a UI designer or a artist or a software engineer.

I’ve been telling all my friends about my recent issues with gathering data in an appropriate way.  Each and every one is shocked.  They all know how to google some fact and they also know the internet knows everything there is to know about anything.  I try to explain the problem but have some trouble.  So I’ll do it in writing instead.

The basic problem is that the internet is too powerful.  You can express whatever you want, but, more importantly for us, you can express it however you want.  You can lay things out differently, use different fonts, change the order of things.  That doesn’t even include animations, flash, images and crazy tricks that I barely even understand.

I’ll give you an example from my new data sources.  There are two sources I’m using that both reference the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  I will paste the code.  Don’t worry if you don’t understand.  Do notice how obviously different the two are from each other.

Compare:
http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/reference/timelines/timeline1865.html

   1: <tr bgcolor="#cccccc">

   2:     <td><b>04-14-1865</b></td>

   3:     <td align="left"></td>

   4:     <td align="left"></td>

   5:     <td align="left"></td>

   6:     <td align="left"></td>

   7:     <td align="left">Lincoln assassinated.  Assasination attempt against Seward &amp; his son. The Stars &amp; Stripes raised over Ft. Sumter.</td>

   8: </tr>

with:

http://www.historyplace.com/civilwar/index.html

   1: <center>

   2:  

   3:   <p><a name="shot" _base_href="http://www.historyplace.com/civilwar/"></a><b><font color="#0000a0" size="+1">Lincoln Shot</font></b> 

   4:   </p>

   5: </center>

   6:  

   7: <p><b><font color="#ff0000">April 14, 1865</font></b> - The Stars and Stripes

   8: is ceremoniously raised over Fort Sumter. That night, Lincoln and his wife

   9: Mary see the play "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theater. At

  10: 10:13 p.m., during the third act of the play, John Wilkes Booth shoots

  11: the president in the head. Doctors attend to the president in the theater

  12: then move him to a house across the street. He never regains consciousness.

  13: </p>

There are many complicated and less complicated differences, but its obvious to even the most untrained eye that these two pages will require two difference programs.  In fact, what I’ve found is that for a project like this one, one that requires so much detail in its information, cannot use a general purpose algorithm to understand the vast information available on the internet.

So, you might ask, what am I doing?  Well, I’m adding the data.  One.  Site.  At.  A.  Time.