Soliciting Opinions on Publication Methods

March 11, 2014 5:28 PM

I spent about five years compiling a technology timeline. It started as a class project and grew into an obsession. For a while, I was making an enormous number of Wikipedia contributions. After a while, I started posting my work to my blog . Then, I started writing "This Day in History" columns for a few paying venues. It's actually grown well beyond what's currently available on my blog. The problem is that I've grown bored of pouring time into the project.

I'm at the point where I don't really feel like paying to host the work indefinitely, and unlike Hobbes' Internet Timeline, my work isn't considered authoritative and, as such, I don't really pull in all that much traffic. However, it would sort of break my heart to just stuff it in a drawer and forget about it.

I'm looking for suggestions as to how I could publish my massive timeline in some useful format that wouldn't cost me money to maintain.

I've considered self-publishing through Kindle, but I think that would require me to officially license the images I've used and I don't think I would sell enough copies to cover the cost. I've thought about running a KickStarter like The Vanamo Online Game Museum, but I don't know if the project has the popular appeal to draw in the required support.

What I'd really like to do is compile my work into a wiki, interactive timeline, or encyclopedia and offer it as a single free downloadable executable file.

Any suggestions? Should the project be preserved, published, or scrapped? What format would make the information most useful if I preserve it? What software might I use to compile it? Who might be interested in taking over hosting it?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts, even if it's just "Junk it!"

posted by Pipedreamergrey to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

How big is it? One possibility would be to host it one something like github.
posted by pombe at 5:47 PM on March 11, 2014

Response by poster: As a textfile, the whole thing is a couple of Megs. With images, it's a couple hundred megs. As a Wordpress installation, complete with database, I'm not sure. The question is, would it be useful to anyone on GitHub as a text file?
posted by Pipedreamergrey at 5:56 PM on March 11, 2014

Best answer: Tom Merritt maintains a This Day in Tech History site, including a book published though LuLu. I wonder if he could give you some advice, or even add your contributions to his (or vice-versa, or whatever!) (unless I misunderstand, and your work is more General History)?
posted by easement1 at 8:17 PM on March 11, 2014

Who might be interested in taking over hosting it?

I'm an editor at a fairly large website, and we're always on the lookout for interesting content like this that we can pay for and host. Perhaps contact some of the big publications in your field and see if they are interested

and if it happens to be about web development, send me a message!
posted by third word on a random page at 8:45 PM on March 11, 2014 [1 favorite]

It wouldn't have to be a text file on Github. You could publish it using Github Pages. If it's already a Wordpress site, you might be able to do the initial setup via Jekyll.
posted by expialidocious at 9:23 AM on March 12, 2014

Response by poster: @easement1 I hadn't known about Tom Merritt's This Day in Tech History book. I think that I'll e-mail him and ask if publishing the site as a book has proved worthwhile. Thank-you for the suggestion.
posted by Pipedreamergrey at 9:19 PM on March 12, 2014

Response by poster: I hadn't known about Github Pages either. That seems like it might be a really good next step for me. It would save me the hosting costs. Thanks.
posted by Pipedreamergrey at 9:22 PM on March 12, 2014