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Holocaust Historiography Project
Dedicated to examining the disparities between "the Holocaust" as it is commonly known, and the actual historiography of "the Holocaust."
Tuesday, November 26, 2024
Friday, November 22, 2024
The new CODOH Foundation
CODOH — Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust — was one of the many brain-children of the late Bradley Smith. In the years since his death, the CODOH Foundation fell into disrepair, to the point where it was no longer able to serve the functions for which it had been imagined.
Last week, friends and supporters of Bradley Smith created a new version: The CODOH Charitable Foundation Trust or 2024.
The CODOH Charitable Foundation Trust of 2024 is registered with the IRS as a 501(c)(3) corporation, which means that donations to it are both tax-deductible and support CODOH activities.
Contributors are welcome to send their support to CODOH at PO Box 2355, Healdsburg, CA 95448.
For full disclosure, we are on the board of The CODOH Charitable Foundation Trust of 2024, but neither take nor receive any funds from it.
Tuesday, November 05, 2024
Holocaust Encyclopedia
We started adding a mirror of the Holocaust Encyclopedia site here, and wound up spending four weeks rewriting the code and shuffling everything around. It is an amazing resource, though, and it is worth the effort.
You can see our version here.
Sunday, April 09, 2017
Recent improvements
The transition from Movable Type to WordPress was not as bad as it could have been, but the devil is in the details. It was the details that took awhile to get ironed out.
For the longest time, the Clippings section (formerly generated by Movable Type — now by WordPress) was in a sub-directory of the main site. This was unwieldy from the beginning, and every attempt to streamline various aspects failed to provide a satisfactory outcome.
Eventually, we had to sacrifice the site-wide search that this arrangement afforded visitors, moving the Clippings section off to its own domain (.org instead of .com). This in turn required a bunch of URL jiggling, but now that it is done has become a much better way of managing all the assets ... both static and dynamic.
Of course, one of the main issues with any WordPress site is the speed at which the server dishes out pages to visitors. Yeah, we tried all the big-name caching programs — but without success (and they can be a pain just to set up). We tried paying more for hosting, but saw no improvement in terms of site speed.
Finally, we gave Digital Ocean a shot. Whoa! Talk about speed, and when was the last time the least expensive option turned out to be clearly superior to the much more expensive alternatives? The Clippings section seems to load more quickly off of Digital Ocean than any of our sites on WP Engine, and WP Engine is a great managed WordPress hosting system.
We then embellished WordPress with Autoptimize, Cloudflare, Jetpack, and Simple Cache, and for a couple bucks a month we have a fast, reliable, secure WordPress installation. Saints be praised!
Recently we upgraded to HTTPS secure connections thanks to Let’s Encrypt and Server Pilot. We might have lost a couple milliseconds in response time to HTTPS, but nothing made-man is without compromise, and security is better than wishful thinking, right?
On the static side, we have revamped the war crimes trials documentation extensively. There is more work to be done there, but it is already much more useable than it was.
We also added a lot of material that was generated by the late William Lindsey. His headlines from The New York Times are a great way of stepping back into that time period.
There are also a couple of new videos, including two by Mark Dice.
We have moved a few files to normalize the internal structure of the site, meaning visitors from search engines may wind up in a dead end once in awhile, but the pages are all still there. With the site structure normalized, we were better able to implement breadcrumb navigation.
Finally, we have even found the time to add a few important items to the Clippings section — some old and some new.
Onward and upward!
For the longest time, the Clippings section (formerly generated by Movable Type — now by WordPress) was in a sub-directory of the main site. This was unwieldy from the beginning, and every attempt to streamline various aspects failed to provide a satisfactory outcome.
Eventually, we had to sacrifice the site-wide search that this arrangement afforded visitors, moving the Clippings section off to its own domain (.org instead of .com). This in turn required a bunch of URL jiggling, but now that it is done has become a much better way of managing all the assets ... both static and dynamic.
Of course, one of the main issues with any WordPress site is the speed at which the server dishes out pages to visitors. Yeah, we tried all the big-name caching programs — but without success (and they can be a pain just to set up). We tried paying more for hosting, but saw no improvement in terms of site speed.
Finally, we gave Digital Ocean a shot. Whoa! Talk about speed, and when was the last time the least expensive option turned out to be clearly superior to the much more expensive alternatives? The Clippings section seems to load more quickly off of Digital Ocean than any of our sites on WP Engine, and WP Engine is a great managed WordPress hosting system.
We then embellished WordPress with Autoptimize, Cloudflare, Jetpack, and Simple Cache, and for a couple bucks a month we have a fast, reliable, secure WordPress installation. Saints be praised!
Recently we upgraded to HTTPS secure connections thanks to Let’s Encrypt and Server Pilot. We might have lost a couple milliseconds in response time to HTTPS, but nothing made-man is without compromise, and security is better than wishful thinking, right?
On the static side, we have revamped the war crimes trials documentation extensively. There is more work to be done there, but it is already much more useable than it was.
We also added a lot of material that was generated by the late William Lindsey. His headlines from The New York Times are a great way of stepping back into that time period.
There are also a couple of new videos, including two by Mark Dice.
We have moved a few files to normalize the internal structure of the site, meaning visitors from search engines may wind up in a dead end once in awhile, but the pages are all still there. With the site structure normalized, we were better able to implement breadcrumb navigation.
Finally, we have even found the time to add a few important items to the Clippings section — some old and some new.
Onward and upward!
Friday, February 28, 2014
The big switch ...
... from Movable Type to WordPress.
The spine of the Holocaust Historiography Project site consists of "static" HTML files, which are maintained by hand.
However, there is also the large and growing "Clippings" section, which until today was handled by Movable Type. Movable Type is a "blogging" platform that -- when set up correctly -- combines the best of a dynamic site with the best of a static site.
Unfortunately, a couple of years ago Movable Type discontinued its free version, and for a modest site such as ours the price of admission to the paid version was out of the question.
This lack of a free ("community") version of Movable Type left us high and dry. Without a continuing stream of updates, we were at risk of security holes in the older version we were using. However, WordPress at that time did not accept entry dates prior to 1970, due to its reliance on the UNIX date scheme.
As luck would have it, though, the current version of WordPress contains a built-in work-around for the UNIX date limitation. This meant that, with a bit of work converting items from Movable Type to WordPress, we could finally transition to a modern blogging platform.
There are still some rough edges, but most of the content is still there. Now we just have to fix the broken links, massage the formatting, and generally integrate the new Clippings section with the old static pages.
The spine of the Holocaust Historiography Project site consists of "static" HTML files, which are maintained by hand.
However, there is also the large and growing "Clippings" section, which until today was handled by Movable Type. Movable Type is a "blogging" platform that -- when set up correctly -- combines the best of a dynamic site with the best of a static site.
Unfortunately, a couple of years ago Movable Type discontinued its free version, and for a modest site such as ours the price of admission to the paid version was out of the question.
This lack of a free ("community") version of Movable Type left us high and dry. Without a continuing stream of updates, we were at risk of security holes in the older version we were using. However, WordPress at that time did not accept entry dates prior to 1970, due to its reliance on the UNIX date scheme.
As luck would have it, though, the current version of WordPress contains a built-in work-around for the UNIX date limitation. This meant that, with a bit of work converting items from Movable Type to WordPress, we could finally transition to a modern blogging platform.
There are still some rough edges, but most of the content is still there. Now we just have to fix the broken links, massage the formatting, and generally integrate the new Clippings section with the old static pages.
Friday, October 25, 2013
Video section now done
Each of the pages / files in the Video section should now be updated with the new format.
Also, videos are no longer in Flash format, in favor of MP4 files. With the newly implemented JW Player, this should allow any visitor to view the video files on any device. Verified to work on desktop Macintoshes running OS X, as well as iPhone and iPad. If you have a problem viewing the videos, let me know.
Also, videos are no longer in Flash format, in favor of MP4 files. With the newly implemented JW Player, this should allow any visitor to view the video files on any device. Verified to work on desktop Macintoshes running OS X, as well as iPhone and iPad. If you have a problem viewing the videos, let me know.
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Still under construction
Yep, just like the folks doing the website for healthcare.gov, we've had plenty of time to work on everything, and yet there are still a lot of rough edges. Maybe if we'd had a $600+ million budget, we'd be almost done.
It's taking so long that Bootstrap 3 is taking the place of Bootstrap 2. Video is being converted over to JW Player, which is not only easy to use but provides responsive video sizes, the perfect complement to Bootstrap's responsive features.
Meanwhile, as we're slogging along in the trenches just to get the old stuff to look better (forget about new stuff ... with the possible exception of Mark Dice's great video on the Holocaust celebration petition), Bradley Smith over at CODOH is celebrating the publication of the 200th edition of his Smith's Report. Wow.
It's taking so long that Bootstrap 3 is taking the place of Bootstrap 2. Video is being converted over to JW Player, which is not only easy to use but provides responsive video sizes, the perfect complement to Bootstrap's responsive features.
Meanwhile, as we're slogging along in the trenches just to get the old stuff to look better (forget about new stuff ... with the possible exception of Mark Dice's great video on the Holocaust celebration petition), Bradley Smith over at CODOH is celebrating the publication of the 200th edition of his Smith's Report. Wow.
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