ExploreThomasCole.org Launches

With funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cedar Grove (The Thomas Cole National Historic Site) and Historicus, Inc. have launched Explore Thomas Cole, an interactive tour, gallery, and map of paintings and biographical information about the founder of the Hudson River School of landscape painting.  We worked together with an amazing team of scholars, museum curators, and educators from Cedar Grove and our favorite design partners Liza Cunningham and Matthew Latkeiwicz from Firehaus Studios.

We are especially thrilled because after years of using Ruby on Rails just for database content management systems, ExploreThomasCole.org shows off the flexibility and power of Rails to organize and display thousands and thousands of rows of information in an attractive and easy maintained structure. While we have been big advocates of Adobe Flash, this site also represents a step for us in creating cleaner, more accessible semantic web content that uses Flash for just the pieces that are impossible or difficult to do efficiently in XHTML and CSS.

The latest crop of standards compliant browsers (Firefox, Safari, and Opera) made development more fun, and a new version of Zoomify (our image magnification component) offered us some exciting new starting points for our Flash customization work. We did what we could to support IE 7 and 8, and are still working on “hacks” to get the site to work in those browsers. We also worked to get the major components of the site working on IE 6, but mercifully the proportion of visitors with that browser is dropping steadily.

We will be taking off the beta wrapper on the site when our browser testing and tweaking is complete, and when the rights and reproductions folks can sign off on permissions and high resolution images for the artwork. Check out the new project and drop us a line on what you think can be improved: www.explorethomascole.org!