Class of '65 Case Study

Introduction

The Class of '65 site at hr65.org was the first site based on the template to go live. I thought it might be useful to record our experience with the template for the benefit of other classes using it. Note that, because we were first, we spent a good deal of time dealing with glitches in the template, which have now been fixed, so that subsequent classes shouldn't have to worry about them.

Finding Content

Publications Page

This turned out to be much easier than I'd anticipated. I knew of a few classmates who had written books but I found a lot more by going through the last five years of Class Notes from Harvard Magazine. Because the magazine is online, that turned out to be much easier than you'd expect. The whole five years worth of notes appears on a single page and all you have to do is to scan down looking for the italics used for the names of publications.

(In order to access the Class Notes on Harvard Magazine, you have to register with their system, which can take a few days. This is not the same as registering with post.harvard.edu.)

Once I'd combined the results of the Class Notes search with my own knowledge I had a very respectable 50+ books on the site.

I would estimate that using the helper program described here, the whole process could be accomplished in a single day.

Note that it may seem complicated to get an Amazon Associates account but that only takes a few minutes and the browser tool bar that they provide greatly simplifies the process of building links to the books.

Also, some sort of photo-editing software is needed to retouch book photographs downloaded from Amazon. I used Photoshop but I'm sure that many simpler and cheaper programs would do just fine for this simple task. (Anyone who uses something else might let us know what it is.)