Don has created several websites that document World War II. While Don's content is great, the HTML coding of his webpages wasn't. His webpages used turn-of-the-century (late 1990s/early 2000s) versions of HTML. The danger was modern web browsers not knowing how to render his ancient pages.

When Don's “web guy” died and was no longer available to maintain his site, his website languished and he lost his domain name. Eventually, his webpages could only be found on the Wayback Machine.

With Don's permission, we stepped in to rescue his site. We moved his web pages over to our web server and modernized their code but kept their appearance at Don's request. We cut the code size down by more than 50 percent. By using a lighter-weight image format, we were able to double the size of his thumbnail images without increasing bandwidth requirements.

Don was impressed that his webpages and images were being updated by a computer program rather than with human “elbow grease”. He said he didn't know that was possible. The programs were quickly-written shell scripts running on a Linux system calling upon open source software such as Imagemagick to resize and convert the hundreds of photos.

Since his web pages are similar in format, a templating system would allow him to create new pages without having to learn how to code—and still have efficient web pages.

Don's web page honoring Brig. Gen. Carlyle H. Ridenour is an example and has links to his other pages at the bottom.

Don also created a page with a map of Maryland that had text that was too small to read without zooming in greatly. The map is a bit-map image, not an SVG, so the only way to present the user with easily readable text was to create an image map for the image and have (a copy of) the text written to a message area at the top of the screen. This worked well as long as the image was rendered in its full size. The image map didn't work if the image was scaled by, say, CSS.

Our modified map page works great on a small screen, like a smartphone, because of the ease of moving around the large image by touch.