I wish sickness didn’t exist. This whole being flat on the couch for days sucks.
Find my Omeka installation here:
While our lovely professor requested cat photos, I figured I’d do us one better; on my Omeka installation, you will find a photo of not only my cat Koda holding his feet in his sleep, but also a photo of our family dog Maple, and a nice landscape photo of the top of Hudson Bay Mountain in Smithers, BC, to get everyone excited for skiing season (It’s right around the corner!)
My experience setting up Omeka was quite mundane. While I have some experience with computers and web hosting, Omeka gave me a little more trouble than WordPress did (Mind you, I have experience with WordPress). The first problem I kept running into was that Omeka would default a directory for it’s installation, so when I went to omeka.pgmichaelchester.com, it would show me an index list (Since the application hadn’t actually been installed in this location.) Once I got that sorted out, I ran into a problem that I didn’t manage to solve; Omeka won’t preview the photos I’ve attached until you click on them. I’m not sure if that is my doing or if that is just how the application works.
Using it for the very insignificant amount of time that we did, I can not think of any advantages using Omeka to complete a task over another application. I am sure with my complete and utter lack of knowledge around Omeka or its capabilities that I have the comment I made is quite ignorant, but for the task we just completed I feel as though WordPress (as an example) would have done a much better job previewing my photos in a presentable way. I feel as though WordPress and other basic applications of the sort do a great job at giving you plenty of power with very little knowledge; however, looking at Omeka, I feel powerless trying to use the application without any experience with it.
I took a look at some of the examples they have on Omeka’s website in their “Showcase” section, and I stand by my prior statement; WordPress would do a better job. As previously mentioned, I could be missing something big time here, but having an entire application for archive-style websites seems kind of redundant. The only advantage I could think of in that context would be the file repository, which might be better suited for file organization, which would be quite important with a archive if hundreds of files. I was a fan of the page they titled “Cleveland Historical”. I liked the map built into the website where you could click on different locations to learn about the history of it. You can find Omeka’s showcase page at the button below.
EDIT: I found out the part of Omeka I was missing. It makes much more sense when you take more than a couple seconds to grasp it is designed fully as an archive system and nothing more. I finally clued in when I realized that Omeka had automatically cited all my files (Which, by the way, is quite a cool feature for an application of the sort.)
