Heart of Lincoln Land

Photo tour screenshot (showing the Lincoln Home). Start the tour>>

You may remember last summer (and early fall) I took a series of photos for my Lincoln Land 80s CD project, which I use to showcase (on CD covers for my custom 80s music CD collection) areas of Springfield that are unique to the city. I do this every year or so because I love it. I think it’s a creative way to honor Mr. Lincoln’s hometown.

Included are big, well known sites like the Lincoln Home and Museum, and the Old State Capitol, lesser known places like the Vachel Lindsay Home and the Iles House, streetscapes that define the city, unique places in older neighborhoods on each side of town, and more. I decided to take all of the 88 photos and create a good photo tour of Springfield on my blog using all of the photos, so that you can tour these places that make Springfield unique yourself. Last year was especially important, because it was the year of the Lincoln Bicentennial, so this tour will be a great resource for showing what the city looked like that momentous year in history.

Move your mouse over one of the pink arrows on the map to see what it is – then click on it to see the photo.

Over the past few months I’ve been coding custom CSS and HTML to make it work. I wanted to make it so that you could click a spot on a map of Springfield where a photo was taken, and up would pop a photo with a description so you can see what it looks like, and a bit of the history behind it. I succeeded in creating a tour like this (though it took more time than I thought). Each photo is marked on the map with a pink arrow and number from 1 to 88 (assigned in the chronological order I took the pictures), and when you move your mouse over a pink arrow, you’ll see a little tooltip that tells you what it is. Then when you click on it, you’ll see the picture and the description. The photos I used in this tour are much better quality than the ones I posted on my blog last year – they’re 720×540 pixels instead of little 200×150 thumbnails, allowing much more detail to be shown.

I plan to keep doing this project in the future to improve upon photos taken in the past, and to show what changes have occurred. I’ll likely base tours from future iterations of Lincoln Land 80s off the same CSS code, eventually creating a tour where you can go back in time as well, and see the changes that have occurred.

The tour is saved as a special page on my blog, so you will always be able to access it. It’s called Springfield: A Bicentennial Portrait, and you can access it from the Pages section in the sidebar. Enjoy the tour!

I have some great news with the Lincoln T-shirts to share with you too. I’ll make another post soon about it!

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