Happy New Year!

Best wishes for the New Year! Six months ago, I took Historicus, Inc. virtual and moved to Ascoli Piceno, Italy with my family for a year. With broadband, borrowed office space, and a compact developer setup (MacBook Pro and 5TB of RAID disks), I had the company back up and running in a week and the team communicating over BaseCamp and a Voice over IP line.  

All the hard work of the past few years (sometimes with as many as 10 employees working full time) gave me a storehouse full of coding and historical primary source resources to work with this year, so new projects are moving right along with this smaller, dispersed, but more efficient team approach. This month we are working on a digital archive of Thomas Cole Hudson River School paintings (near and dear to all US historians and art lovers), several new projects for Cengage Learning, a MesoAmerican codex archive, and maintaining our recently launched Circopedia.org.

Last but not least, I have relaunched the Historicus, Inc. site on a web platform called SquareSpace. Our needs were a bit too simple for a full drupal CMS installation, but too dynamic and rapidly changing for a static HTML site.  Moreover, SquareSpace’s clean typography and layouts got under our skin in a good way.  Let me know what you think. I look forward to working and collaborating with some of you in 2009.