This Website (2024)
After months of work, being burnt out, and people messaging me asking where the website was, I finally released the website to the public on September 9th, 2024. I wanted to do a retrospective of the release, reception, technology, and statistics on how the launch went.
I went back and looked at my texts to figure out when I actually began this project. March 2nd, 2024 was the day I picked up the first batch of yearbooks from my old teacher Alan Welding. I remember driving to his house, picking up a 100 lb box of yearbooks, and taking them back home to begin scanning. It was freezing and raining outside. Within 48 hours I had scanned through 20 or so yearbooks, each 150+ pages each. I underestimated how fascinating I’d find the process and how little I wanted to be outside in Pittsburgh’s peak of winter.
By April 2nd, 2024 I’d scanned the entire collection that the Chartiers Valley School District had at their high school digital media center. I had the majority of the Scott and Chartiers Valley High School yearbooks up until the 2010’s, and some Bridgeville/Lincoln yearbooks thrown in. It was at this point I started visiting the Bridgeville Historical Society to borrow some from their collection. They had almost 95% of the yearbooks I was missing from CV and the entire Bridgeville collection. Not only were they willing to let me access their collection, they allowed me to borrow 200 lbs of yearbooks for a week to scan and bring back.
May 9th, 2024 I went to Harrisburg to visit the Pennsylvania State Archives. I had been in communication with one of their in-house researchers prior to my visit. They kindly translated my general request for documents into a collection of boxes I could request. The facility itself is gorgeous, they finished construction at the tail end of COVID and recently completed their transfer of all documents to the new storage location. It felt like a mix between a community library in an affluent neighborhood and the cleanliness of a medical library. I’d received approval to bring my scanner ahead of my arrival. They were fine with it so long as it wouldn’t touch the documents, otherwise their on-site scanning was dollars per page. I ended up scanning over 2,000 pages of documents, you do the math. When I sat down, a militant librarian barked at me “You sit here. You do not move. If you need something, you sit and ask. There are cameras watching your every move.” For the next 8 hours, my partner would request the next boxes in the queue (as you were only allowed to have 3 at a time), identify sections related to my search, and then transfer the boxes over to my side of the table for me to scan. I’m a bit of an independent perfectionist, but there’s no way I’d have been able to search and scan by myself. Eventually the first librarian left and the subsequent observers were incredibly kind and curious about the project. One of them came up and sat on the table in front of us, and talked to me about the project for an hour. Their passion for education specifically felt like a sign I was in the right place. We completed our scanning journey with a full hard drive and drove 4 hours back to Pittsburgh.
Originally this project was only yearbooks, I’d added the historical portion of it half way through. At one point I was faced with two options. I could release both projects together, or release the yearbooks and then the history project after. I ultimately chose to release them together. I’d voice the concern to friends aware of the project that while it’ll be a great search tool, ultimately it’s a short lived novelty site that captures immediate and widespread attention before dying down. If I didn’t release the history project at the same time, it’d never be seen, read, and appreciated by the same traffic visiting the site also there for yearbooks. In the end, this was the best decision I’d made. I was right about the traffic and novelty, and feel incredibly proud of the research material that others have read.
Over the next few weekends I would slowly comb through the scanned documents and attempt to recreate the historical timeline found in this project. If I’m remembering correctly, I wrote for 9 hours a day for multiple weekends in a row. The real challenge was the Carnegie documents. They had the history of CV’s journey, but the folder was so large I scanned them all into one giant PDF of hundreds of pages. Scanning each document, extracting the date, and naming the file accordingly would have taken far too long.
After I completed the majority of the reorganization period writing, I just stopped entirely. I was so burnt out from scanning, searching, writing, and isolating myself from my friends and family that I needed a break. Remember, nobody asked or forced me to do this project, I chose to do it myself. However, I did not do a great job pacing myself and not placing pressure on myself to get it done soon. I kept telling myself my goal was to have the site ready before school would go back into session. Surely the entire summer would give me enough time to translate what I’d written into the website you see today, right?
Wrong. The website portion of the project was the part I had originally been the most excited about. I love technology (being an engineer) and have done many websites in the past. When it came time to find a design, I couldn’t find anything that spoke to me. I wanted something modern, responsive, in HTML5, and enough flexibility to capture blogs (for history) and yearbook tables. I went through 3 rewrites of the design before settling on what you see today. The most time consuming portions of the web design were creating the tables of 300 yearbooks and other documents, and translating my citations into links that work on the website. You can’t just copy paste them, they have to link between pages and point to the right document. To make it more complicated, each individual research page had its own works cited page and I had the brilliant idea of waiting until the consolidation (lol) of them on the website to merge everything into 1 master works cited list.
Over several weekends in August I’d take my folding chair and dog down to a park by my house and work away on the website. My dog Piper would lay at my feet and ward off any geese getting too close that could impede progress. I’d sit in the sun, code, and say hello to neighbors and friends as they’d walk by. I’d finish the final touches between gaming sessions with friends, fixing typos, broken links, and other issues instead of carrying my weight on the team.
On September 9th, 2024 I posted a Facebook post about the release of the website. I’m a user of too many social media platforms, however Facebook is the most well suited for sharing information in this way and accessing the direct communities I was attempting to target. The website was going to be as perfect as I was going to get it by myself and was honestly tired of coding with no feedback. Within hours the site was flooded by traffic due to the Facebook post.
On that day alone over 2,900 unique visitors accessed the website. The majority were in the United States, but clearly several of our community members abroad in Germany and France were also paying attention. The Facebook post spread like wildfire. Between the organic shares from community members and the posts I made in various community groups, anyone connected digitally was aware of the site. In the first 24 hours, over 2 terabytes of yearbooks were downloaded. For perspective, your iPhone is probably 128GB. The community downloaded the equivalent of 15 fully loaded iPhones from the website’s file storage. There’s a technical deep dive on the technology stack page for the technologies we employ, but at the time, Amazon Web Services S3 was used for the yearbook storage. In no way shape or form did I expect the volume of traffic that we received. Overnight it cost $300 USD in bandwidth traffic alone. Day 2 of the website had about half the traffic as the day before and that trend continued to the daily traffic it sees today.
Now let’s talk about the reception of the website. To be transparent, I was really worried about how the site would be perceived. I knew it would be appreciated and loved by community members who wanted to take a trip down memory lane. I was, however, unsure of how the district themselves would receive it. The district itself had no approved, endorsed, supported, etc. the project in any way. Individual publishers, like the middle and high school yearbook clubs, did give me permission to scan. The only stipulation was that digital yearbooks weren’t available until 10 years after publishing in an effort to not hurt physical sales. I was immediately behind this term. Additionally, the 10 year buffer window also ensured nobody currently under 18 would have their pictures published.
I had one primary concern. It’s unclear in copyright law who owns the copyright for these yearbooks. Some physical book prints are copyright to their printer/publisher, and others to the producer (like the school itself). The copyright for printed material like this lasts 70 years from the time it was published. This would put some of the old Scott Township and Bridgeville yearbooks in public domain, but the grand majority of them not. When the former school districts merged to legally form the Chartiers Valley School District, they technically took over their copyrights. It would then put 95% of the content on the website in jeopardy of being taken down if the district approved it. I had received permission from the individual groups within the district, but it’s unclear legally how that would hold up if the governing district administration disagreed.
Luckily, a few days into the project I received an email from the district’s administration. I saw the notification on my phone and braced for a cease and desist and readied my bank account to retain a lawyer. Instead, they were gushing over how proud they were and congratulating me on the achievement. Not only did they love it, they reiterated sentiments they’d been hearing throughout the entire community on how incredible it was. I was flabbergasted. My guard immediately came down and a flood of emotion came over me. People loved it. The district loved it. The only emotion I have to experience is pride.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Kellen Stepler of the TribLive who wrote a beautiful article about my experience with the project. I had no idea they’d interview the teachers who assisted me with the project. People sent me pictures of the article in print. It felt like a full circle moment. Here I’d spent months scanning old newspaper articles found in government archives, and now I had my own.
Over the next few days and weeks I’d receive Facebook comments, texts, and emails from those who viewed the site. A friend from K-12 told me they and their sister sat in Facetime and went through every single yearbook from their time at CV to find themselves. I received other messages from individuals whose parents had never seen their own yearbooks and how special it was to them. At my brother's wedding a month later, someone stopped me after I walked down the aisle and asked “Are you the guy from the Bridgeville news?” and the florist told me how cool it was to see their elementary yearbooks.
After what felt like years of research and writing a masters thesis, I was finally done. As an engineer, all I’ve ever wanted from the things I built is for others to enjoy them. When I worked in insurance, I was motivated all day every day to make things easier for everyone to use. My current engineering boss has understood how important this aspect is to me and has worked to get me into projects that would allow me to achieve that goal. The conclusion of this project was the ultimate form of success to that goal I’ve experienced. I was overwhelmed with the reception, kindness, passion, stories, and gratitude people had shown me. The work I did meant something. It gave people the ability to experience and reflect on where they came from, something I wanted to do as the impetus for the project. I’m proud of the work I got to do here and the lives it touched.
I’ll continue to scan new yearbooks, but I consider this project a success. Ideally, I’d like to move onto something else and get someone involved in taking over the ongoing scanning. Until then, I’ll be around monitoring the site, fixing errors as they’re discovered, and doing what I can to keep this site alive.
Thank you for reading this. Thank you for looking at this website. Thanks for believing in me and egging me on throughout the project. This has been the experience of a lifetime.
- Austin