Building the Site

Building the Jamaica Hotel History Website

Digitized Newspapers:

Newspaper Archive has both Jamaica newspapers. Set Country to Jamaica. They have a free trial.
- Jamaica Gleaner (founded 1834). Anything historical is in this one. You can sign up for a Gleaner only Newspaper Archive account, for about half the full account price.
- Jamaica Observer (founded 1993)

Postcards:

eBay has: For Sale and Completed.
Hip Postcard is a marketplace with hundreds of Jamaica postcards for sale.
Delcampe is an international marketplace with a huge number of cards. Most sellers are from outside the US. They make it difficult to buy, unless you pay to join their "club." Delivery from overseas can take a while. And if a card doesn't arrive, and you ask about it, you get a refund and blacklisted.
CardCow has many Jamaica cards, though a bit expensive.

Creating the Site:

Scanning Overview
Procedures
Data Files. With the exceptions of the tourism section and this section, everything is generated by Excel VBA macros using the data in these text files:
- General text files:
  - LocationsTable.txt
  - HotelData.txt
  - Data for Maps:
    - Files off Index
      - Info
      - Data
    - Montego Bay
      - Info
      - Data
    - Ocho Rios
      - Info
      - Data
    - Port Antonio
      - Info
      - Data
  - Data for Articles:
    - Info
    - Data
- Delimited Files that have an Excel editor:
Macros:
The Excel spreadsheet I developed is available on request. It finds/replaces with numerous options, resizes images, creates image links, adds page sideways navigation, creates HTML site maps, etc. It is described here Excel Spreadsheet for Website Code Processing.
For this website, the processing and accessing the data files is done from this dashboard (plus a button on the ImageUtilities sheet that creates clipping entries for the Gleaner):
All of the VBA code that is specific to this website resides in one module. Here's that VBA Code.
Website code is validated with Total Validator Pro.
Host data is keep in sync with the site constructed on the hard drive using SmartSync.

The Future

My will gives this site, the printed materials I've acquired, and the code that maintains it, to the National Library of Jamaica.
Contact: Don Wiss