For our first project for Networked Media Production I have chosen to curate an online exhibition. The medium that most appealed to me was that of photography but the subjects that I had thought about covering were proving hard to come across under the Creative Commons Lisence.
During one of our tutorials, we discussed Machinima and it was this discussion that led me top thinking about a different style of presentation. Adding weight to these thoughts was a podcast that I had recently listened to which covered a project that was being undertaken by Stanford University in the preservation of online worlds. And, thanks to these two threads, we now have… .
Preserve Middle-earth
A heritage site for all things realted to Lord of the Rings Online
While I have been using Tumblr for my blog posts for both this unit and my Web Design and Production blog, I felt that Wordpress would offer me a bit more freedom in the way that I could present the site. The idea is that “Preserve Middle-earth” would act as a type of heritage site, recording the locations of Middle-earth and the people that inhabited this virtual world. Of course, more information on this can be found on the site itself.
In regards to the images used in the site, I felt that by using screenshots created by myself and hosting them on my own Flickr page, I would be able to retain a greater control of what was on the site, how it was presented and the quality of the images included. Having said that, I had posted to various forums and spoken to players in game asking if they would like to contribute images to the project and included a page on the site how they could do this. I found this approach to be interesting as the end result would be a community project that was overseen by myself, but built on by people with a common interest, which in turn supports the idea behind the site in the first place. It also made it easier for me to obtain images for the site, as they were either taken by me, or hosted on my Flickr site using the Creative Commons License. (At this point, there is only one image not of my own creation, and her name is credited in the caption of the photo. As the site grows I will be adding another page of contributors and links to their own sites / photo services)
From a technical point of view, it became evident as time went by that the functions provided by Wordpress.com were not the greatest when it came to the way I would have liked to implement my work. I found that API code that I had discovered from various sites, and the use of Flash code from Flick etc were not supported by Wordpress, which limited the way I could present the material, and eventually had to use Wordpress’ own Flickr Widget which could only be presented in a sidebar on the page.
When thinking about design conventions, I wanted the site to have a clear navigation bar which would allow the user to jump to any page on the site (and also include a search bar), which were organised from a taxonomic point of view, where as the Flickr site took a more folksonomic approach with photos all being tagged for ease of searching if a user were looking for a specific location, name etc.
I also included a Blogroll which gave links to other sites that the reader may be interested in taking a look at, as they were relevant to my own site.
Below this was the PME Gallery, which is the Flickr widget I mentioned earlier which takes twenty photos directly from the Flickr page and displays them in the sites sidebar while also acting as a direct link to the page.
While there are many other sites that include screenshots of the game such as the official Lord of the Rings Online site or LotRO Wiki, my site is unique in the fact that it speaks more about the locations within the game and how a community is formed in these virtual places, adding a context to the gallery that isn’t present in other sites. It also gives the community to participate in the continuation of the idea in itself building another layer to the social interaction that these people share in game.
While the site as it stands isn’t what I initially imagined, it has gone a long way to show me how different “blogging sites” can be used for different things, and each one has its own strong and weak points. On the bright side, due to the community focus put across on the site, there is a great opportunity for the site to grow and change over time, and as the game itself grows, so will the site and then, when the game eventually becomes just a memory, “Preserve Middle Earth” will remain as a reminder to all those who took part in the experience and put a smile on their face.
Hi, my name is Shaun Cahill. You might remember me from such 
