I started experimenting with Omeka, just to see what I could do with it. It’s a content management system designed for showcasing digital collections, such as libraries, museums and archives might have. I’ve had discussions with a professor about working on a class project with a local museum, and Omeka could be a tool for the job, so I want to learn the ins and outs.
It’s also one of the tools Reclaim Hosting makes available through Domain of One’s Own, so that makes it easy to set up with a one-click install. Storage space is a potential issue, so I wanted to offload that to S3. I wondered how to connect the two, so I googled it and what do you know? Jim wrote up a walk-through a few months ago. This was kind of a lifesaver because the process involves typing some arcane gibberish in both the S3 settings and the Omeka config.ini file. I ran into a problem with the Amazon endpoint. Apparently you (or I) do need to specify the endpoint, which means figuring out what it is. The nice people at Reclaim helped me out with that. My S3 account is in the US West region for some reason, so the endpoint is https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com.
And with that, I have an Omeka site. What I’m using for my collection is a bunch of hand-drawn newspapers that my father made when he was 10-12 years old. Some people put their kids’ drawings on the refrigerator. I put my father’s on the web. I still need to think about how I’m going to build out the site, but I’ve made a start.
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