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 kowalski
   
 |  | Vanishing Point
< on 11/15/2010 9:38 PM >
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Apparently I never posted about the new version of Vanishing Point that I launched back in the summer. Let me rectify this:
vanishingpoint.ca
water underground
Some sample posts:
Water, Sewage and Mud: Toronto's Earlscourt and Junction Sewers
Thinking about the Human River Walk
Mining in the Urban Field: Excavating the Enwave DLWC System
Assessing the G20 Manhole Incident, and the failure of security through obscurity
Burying the Garrison Creek: A History
William B. Rankine Generating Station
History and Redevelopment
VP had been online for a good five years when I started working on a new version last fall. The old site, built almost entirely out of hand-coded static html pages, looked pretty gnarly but was such a pain to update that I had all but ceased to add to it (it required too many different tasks to update -- it's hard to feel creative about writing something if you then have to go code up a page for it and make all the thumbnails etc. yourself).
It took a lot of work to put in place a content management system that I was happy with and to add and rewrite all most of the content from the old site, but it was worth it. With the CMS in place, I've been able to find the enthusiasm to write and upload content to the site far more regularly, and the design and the more mature 'voice' of the content is far more reflective of where I am today and of the ideas and experiences I want to express. Note that the CMS I used (Drupal) is probably not the best place to start unless you have a fair bit of experience with web development -- you're probably much better off tailoring a Wordpress installation or one of the 'out-of-the-box' CMSs to your needs.
Three suggestions for urban explorer/photographers with websites or with the ambition to have a site:
1. Think about the audiences you would like to reach. This is going to be controversial (what do I say that isn't?) but you shouldn't restrict your ambitions to simply directing your work to your fellow explorers or photographers. Think about who else you could be presenting your findings to: the general public in the communities where you have been exploring, history buffs, environmental activists, architects and planners, engineers, relevant industries, etc. Fleeting praise from your fellower urbexers or notoriety from sites like digg and boingboing is nothing compared with being able to contribute to and participate in long-term discussions and changes in how we think about, imagine and (ab)use our urban spaces, economic processes and the physical remnants of history.
This is something that's going to be ongoing -- you're not always going to know for whom your work and insights are going to prove interesting or valuable, and you're not always going to recognize what other people and work will eventually prove interesting to you. The point is not to close any doors prematurely when you make your web presence, keep things open and try to work out how to present in a way that will be useful to broader audiences.
2. Work out what sort of things you would like to publish, and then build your website or blog in a way that makes it easy to present exactly these things and that puts them front-and-center. Don't hide them away behind six different 'atmospheric' landing pages or in back of overly complicated galleries. I can't say I've been wholly successful at this -- my current front page is still a bit of a kludge, and I have yet to get around to fixing the way the search function outputs results -- but the current site organization is a vast improvement over what I had before.
However, I should say that, while you should tailor your design and organization to what you have now, you should try to do it in a way that leaves things open to expansion later. Don't paint yourself into a corner that makes it hard to pursue other subjects or present other kinds of content later. In my experience, the best kind of site is one that grows as you do, not one that is so overly broad or overly narrow at the beginning that stifles your ability to make use of it immediately or develop it over time.
3. Don't be afraid to tell your wider community about where you've been (except when keeping things secret really, really matters). I think you and 'your locations' are at far more risk presenting your new findings on UER than doing so on a website whose focus is on communicating outwards in a mature way, rather than inwards towards an urbex community whose maturity, actions and interests you can't control for.
---
Anyway, thanks for reading and for your patience in allowing me to soapbox a bit here. Hopefully the perspective will prove useful to someone.
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kowalski
| | Re: Vanishing Point
<Reply # 2 on 1/1/2011 11:54 PM >
| | | | Posted by Jondoe_264
Phenomenal! I have nothing but admiration for the amount of work you have put in and the quality of the content, truly inspiring.
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Cheers sir!
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