NEW! The Cast
Boring preamble
I can’t even contain my joy for my new webpage — The Cast! There are still tons of ideas ping-ponging around my head, but I couldn’t wait to share it.
Disclaimer: It’s incomplete and inconsistent. Some people link directly to related blog posts. Some have a profile page (varying from sparse to decent) which links to related blog posts. If I waited until I finished, it would never go live. Over time, this will become a better and better resource, allowing for sorting in all sorts of ways. One could look up governors. Or people of color. Assassins. Pets. Mistresses. People who were alive in the 1800s. The possibilities are endless! Right now, it’s probably riddled with typos and omissions and mistakes. I’m still plugging away at it.
Where I started
I created web pages for Presidents, Vice Presidents, and First Ladies a while back. Always a work in progress, but it was a way to give everyone a presence and link back to any related blog posts.
Later, I started creating pages for everybody else, using blog functionality. Anybody who wasn’t POTUS, Veep, or First Lady. With a complete lack of foresight and imagination, I called called this page Other People. I started to realize the potential and began adding people from the three original buckets, ending up with a big confusing mess.
Yay!
Everyone in one place!
I could pull related people together in newsletters to go with any given theme.
Downsides
Not much flexibility.
Using the blog functionality, everyone appears in the order I add them… I can’t, say, easily have people show up in chronological order.
Duplicative.
Big confusing mess!
This is all very much a work in progress, but I’ve realized there’s value to keeping both approaches. In a more deliberate, consistent way. One way that’s sortable. Another that shows certain people in order, but cleaned up… and everything linking to a page dedicated to that person, with a button that links to any related blog posts.
This will take a while to really pull together.
You may notice a varying level of content quality. (Some pages have lots of info; others are more like “this person existed, click here for more.”)
Some doodles are kinda crappy. This whole project is learning and growing and improving, so yeah… hopefully along the way I’m getting better and I’ll fix things up as I go.
________________________________________
Ta-da!
It’s not perfect. Or done. But it’s live!
People are bucketed in a less confusing way. Presidents, First Ladies, Vice Presidents, foreign leaders, women, etc.
There’s room to grow! I can create new buckets!
The Presidents are color-coded, so you can easily see political party. Unless you have color-blindness. But I’m working on a solution for that.
The First Ladies are color-coded, too. It’s not finished, but you can click in to see who died before their husbands became president. Or who married a former president. And so on!
I even have a spot for people who performed First Lady duties, but weren’t married to a president.
At the end, you can scroll through the last 30 people I added to The Cast. Or use the sub-navigation to peruse governors or ambassadors, etc. I can keep building on this, so holler if you have any requests.
________________________________________
What’s next
I have so much to do to add people, clean up links, fixing pages, cleaning up navigation, etc. My priority is to fix up the President and Vice President pages with new doodles, keeping the pages are more consistent and you can see political party at a glance (for presidents) and whether they went on to become president (for vice presidents).
I’d love to know what you think! Again, this is a long-term project. There are tons of people to add. I’m sure there are mistakes along the way. Comment below or send me a message if you have any feedback or requests.
