What would a good Historical Sciences website look like?

I think it would be regularly updated, and that might not happen here for a while. I was at a meeting yesterday and unexpectedly got an extra project to work on. It’s very exciting, but I’m only in a minor role so I can’t really talk about it. I wouldn’t mention it, except it probably means I won’t be posting much over the summer. When I have more information I’ll be posting it.

The reason I ask what a good site would have is that minor niggles with WordPress.com are acculmulating. It is a good host, it’s a very good host. Unfortunately for all sorts of very good reasons certain things aren’t possible here. Various entries which used shockwave animations broke when I moved here – as did the Hadrian’s Wall entries because of the problem with working with Google Maps.

The big reason for moving here was the cost of hosting and that appears to be solved, so I’m seriously considering moving site again. I’m looking at using Drupal as it does a lot of what I need for my own work. It also allows a few things to be added. What it would mean for you is: –

Various pages can be consolidated onto one site. It would be nice to get the Stonehenge pages working before the solstice, and there are other pages which can be fixed.

A forum could be added. Would this be useful?

Notes that I’m taking on constellations can be put online or Wiki-fied, so that you can follow snippets I’m finding out about various constellations. I’ve toyed with using Mediawiki, but I’d rather use something more integrated with everything else.

Weblog feeds could be aggregated with the site owner’s consent. At the moment I have a news aggregator on the web, but I’m not publishing the address because it pulls the full feed. Pulling all and sundry feeds smacks of splogging to me, but a planet-ishtypesite would be possible if people think it would be helpful. Unfortunately Drupal pulls the full feed and I’d prefer to publish snippets so that people visit the author’s site.

I don’t have it playing nicely with Flickr yet, which is a shame as I’d like to hook into Chiron which is a very useful group for Creative Commons images. On the other hand once I have pagination sorted out it should be possible to put some ancient texts up for those days when Perseus isn’t talking.

Is there anything obvious I’m missing?

There’s also a gimmick that it could also host weblogs for other people. I’ve found that it would be just as easy to host weblogs for other people on the same system, with a friendly HTML editor that looks like Word. I’m trying to get the footnoting function to work for my own gratification. The bizarre bit is that it could also host adverts – your adverts. I’d be running filtered Google Ads to pay the server costs, but the plug-ins I’d be using would allow you to put your own Google publisher code into the adverts on the pages you write. Or better still you could set up here or on blogger instead and run the whole thing yourself.

You can see the test site at lf8.clioaudio.com, and you’re welcome to play about in it, but this is a very temporary address. It might also be a temporary layout. Opinions are welcome.