Welcome to the new americanootoday.com
Welcome to the new home of American OO Today. I started the site in 2008 on a free platform (blogger/blogspot) — but by the summer of 2020 that platform was not working very well for me as an editor/author. Which was an important nudge I needed toward completing the book project I had been working on for many years. But also this put an idea in my mind to update the entire site, after the book was done, as a companion to the book and focused more on operating and collecting.
This post being the first from the new americanootoday.com website. It is a WordPress site. I have used WordPress on other projects, so that that part of the change of platform was easy. I expected also I might be able to import the old site in some form, and I could! All of the 800+ posts were saved initially, but within the site very nearly every link was broken, and there were only a dozen images directly saved from the free blogger site (about half from articles I planned to delete!), another huge issue. There were also quirky format issues in the older articles.
What you see now is a website that is just over half as large, and every single article has been edited for format (the template of the site required a “featured image” be added at the very least), and often for content. Every photo had to be manually downloaded and uploaded to the new site. Editing took easily in excess of 100 hours.
In short, if old site content was directly related to the book, it was deleted off the site, and I cut the long “history by the years” series and the Blow-Smoke series (I have saved these in a PDF if anyone wants them for further research, let me know). I did retain a number of “101” type articles on makers, but the book should be where you turn for serious lists of models and historical information.
Also there was a rationalization of content, as I did have to manually update every single article, some just were not offering much to the reader today and deemed not worth the effort. As of this writing the site has been rebuilt! It is my hope that the combination of the book and the site makes for a pair of strong resources for all interested in American OO, and I believe the updated format opens up the old content to new readers.
The photo below was the first one posted in 2008 and is a fitting one to repeat as the site begins a new era. Thank you for visiting!
Looks great. Lots of work finally completed!
Your work on this site and the book are much appreciated by us who have an interest in American OO scale. Thank you.
John, I want to say a giant” thank you” for your new and finely done book! Your hard work has paid off! I especially found useful, the references to early magazine ads and articles. I have have been able to purchase some of the earliest publications on American 00 and learned in -depth information useful to me. Thank you for recognizing my long time friends Ed Morlok and Pierre Bourassa as they both helped get get started in 00 many years ago. I look forward to regular visits to your new site!
New Book is Great!! This helped me find many useful publications/articles.
Thanks for the flatcar!!