Spacelog: things we did right-ish

Making 40 years ago seem new

Saturday, 12 February 2011

Something 40 years old can’t possibly be interesting.

There’s nothing awe-inspiring about early spaceflight.

Nothing exciting.

And no one knows these stories at all. So no pressure.

We had a huge number of ideas for features, only some of which we’ve had time to build so far.

Today we’ll just talk about some of the underlying ideas that helped guide us as we built the site.

Narrative

Particularly with Apollo 13, something we felt strongly was a need to give a narrative structure to the mission.

But surely everyone already knows the story?

Most of what people remember is probably wrong — down to that famous line, “Houston we have a problem”, which nobody ever said.

In order to present Apollo 13 in a way that made sense, we had to identify and break down the different elements and map how they related to each other. Some people call this “information architecture”, but here we’re really thinking about telling stories.

A story has a beginning, middle and an end. Plus, it has exciting bits, and quotable lines.

So do space missions. Our narrative structure allows people to dive straight into parts of the story…

…or to go through the entire thing, either from a high level where you’re guided through the important points…

…or down in the nitty-gritty of what was actually said, with the most important bits called out for you.

And course a photo now and again is just great.

Sharing

One of the most important things we did was how easy we made sharing.

That sounds obvious…but when we launched we didn’t have a like button, or even tweeting. In fact, when you’re reading the transcript, there’s nothing to distract you — deliberately.

But when you find something you like, you can grab a link to it to share around. People shared stuff on Twitter before we added the ‘tweet’ button, and they shared on Facebook before we added a ‘like’ button. And this worked because of magic…

Any sufficiently advanced URL scheme is indistinguishable from magic

There’s often a rush to build the cool bits of websites, hurrying into the Javascript and making everything gorgeous. A lot of people talk about “doing it right”, but we think that here we really did. On top of the URL structure and the basic pages, we use more magic (this time Javascript) to make things fade in and out, and load when you need them. But because everything is addressable using very simple URLs, it’s really easy to share. Hurray!

Any sufficiently advanced URL scheme is indistinguishable from magic

//apollo11.spacelog.org/04:14:03:20/#log-‐line-‐396200

http://apollo11.spacelog.org/page/04:14:03:20/

spacelog.org/04:14:03:20/04:14:03:36/#log-‐line-‐396200

mission timestamp

mission timestamp highlight

end highlightstart

There’s often a rush to build the cool bits of websites, hurrying into the Javascript and making everything gorgeous. A lot of people talk about “doing it right”, but we think that here we really did. On top of the URL structure and the basic pages, we use more magic (this time Javascript) to make things fade in and out, and load when you need them. But because everything is addressable using very simple URLs, it’s really easy to share. Hurray!

We think it worked: this was our first week. Note that at the shallow end of the curve we’re still getting thousands of visits per day, and tens of thousands of page views. Over our first two months, stickiness is actually better than this: 10 minutes average time on site, 9 pages per visit and ~ 36% bounce. There are site that do better — but we’re pretty proud.

Building a community

One of our other goals was to encourage and enthuse others to help out. By the end of Apollo 17, NASA generated over 30 thousand pages of transcript. And then there’s Skylab, the Shuttle, the ISS…not to mention the Russian space program. So we knew we needed the help!

So far we’ve launched three missions: Apollo 13 and Mercury 6 we did ourselves, but most of the work on Apollo 11 was done by Matthew Somerville. Andrew’s already talked about how we made it easy for people to contribute. You can fork space missions on github!

Since then, a growing team of volunteers has been working on Gemini III, Gemini IV, Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 — but there’s still a huge amount to do, so please GET INVOLVED!

Thanks to

The Spacelog team: Ryan Alexander, James Aylett, George Brocklehurst, David Brownlee, Hannah Donovan, Ben Firshman, Mark Norman Francis, Russ Garrett, Andrew Godwin, Chris Govias, Steve Marshall, Gavin O’Carroll and Matt Ogle.

The Mercury astronauts: Alan Shepherd, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordo Cooper and Deke Slayton.

The Gemini astronauts: John Young, James McDivitt, Ed White, Pete Conrad, Tom Stafford, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, Neil Armstrong, Dave Scott, Gene Cernan, Michael Collins, Richard Gordon and Buzz Aldrin.

The Apollo astronauts: Roger Chaffee, Donn Eisele, Walt Cunningham, Bill Anders, Rusty Schweickart, Al Bean, Jack Swigert, Fred Haise, Stu Roosa, Edgar Mitchell, Al Worden, James Irwin, Ken Mattingly, Charlie Duke, Ronald Evans and Jack Schmitt.

…and the rest of NASA, too numerous to count, but most especially Bob Gilruth. The VAB is the largest single-storey building in the world, and the fourth largest by volume (bigger: assembly buildings for Boeing, Airbus, and a giant airship hangar in Germany). 526 feet tall, taller than the Great Pyramid at Giza. Apollo 10 on its way to the launch pad.

… Tom Stafford…

Images by

• Ben Firshman

• Chris Govias

• Matt Ogle

• NASA

• Universal Pictures / Imagine Entertainment

http://spacelog.org/

@spacelogdotorg

Spacelog: things we did right-ish

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Transcript of Spacelog: things we did right-ish

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