So You Want to Make a Digital Humanities Website

Part Six: Gathering Resources

Part One / Part Two / Part Three / Part Four / Part Five / Part Six

Throughout the process of building Visualizing Abolition I collected a variety of resources and tutorials that helped me in making a website of this type with all of its associated components, i.e. the plugin that produces the database and visualizations. To make your journey a bit easier, I’ve put them all in one place. But this doesn’t mean you should stop here. The biggest skill I learned during the production of this site was googling my heart out. So explore the almost limitless resources and help people are glad to share with you freely.

Programs

  • Atom: Free, open-source, text editor that is scalable and intuitive. I cannot recommend Atom enough.
  • InstantWordpress: An all-in-one free program for testing your Wordpress.org project offline.

Tutorials

Writing and Publishing

HTML/CSS

Wordpress

Other Tutorials

  • Intro to the Command Line: This is particularly important if you want to run Jekyll locally, but also a great thing to know in general when embarking as a programmer of any level.

Themes

  • Layers is the WordPress theme Visualizing Abolition was built on. It has amazing associated documentation that makes expanding and manipulating the look and feel of the site that much easier.

Plugins

Writing

  • Scripto was mentioned earlier when discussing Omeka. However, it can be also be used through WordPress and Drupal.

Maps

Timelines

Other

SSG Resources

  • Contentful: a step above SSGs, combines the simplicity and speed of a static site generator with the collaborative dashboard of a CMS based builder like WordPress.
  • Ghost and Cockpit: open source platforms that bridge the gap between CMS and SSGs.
  • Building CMS Free Websites and Using a SSG at Scale: great articles on the ins and outs of building CMS free, especially at larger scales.

Extend and Collaborate

  • Pelagios Commons: Pelagios Commons provides online resources and a community forum for using open data methods to link and explore historical places

  • Github: The top site for exploring and collaborating on code.

All Sample Sites

Further Reading