What’s New
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Atomic Annie is up! Finished the video section, the essay and then the captions–I’m working at 1:00 am so this is all still February 13th. I think my last weapon for the “Build Up” section is the Regulus. I need to double-check that. There are a few more gun-type uranium weapons out there but they come later on and I need to segue to the thermonuclear ones. I also added a back-up plug-in to the site, just in case. Sort of surprised this didn’t occur to me earlier.
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Working on the Atomic Annie page. Selected and photoshopped images and loaded them into WordPress. Created NukeMap image and link. Completed the stats section and the “Further Reading” section, as well (lots of good links). I still have to finish the video section (will be easy), the captions (will sort of be easy), and the essay (will not be so easy).
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Near midnight. Finished photoshopping the images and polishing the essay. Honest John is up! This was a tough one. Most of the weapons pages are taking 8-10 hours to produce–this one took 16-20, mostly because of the large number of photographs that I made on the road (which I then had to cull through) and the large number of final images (which I then had to photoshop). But it’s a good one.
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Finished culling and photoshopping all images–there are a lot of images for the Honest John, maybe two dozen. Uploaded to page. Finished stats section and NukeMap image and link. Just need to polish the essay now.
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Rewrote intro text on Home page to make the site more inviting, less ponderous. Adjust spacing between blocks on Home page. Should look about right now. Added the Further Reading section for the Honest John. Also, another hour or two trying to cull down my collection of Honest John images. There are more Honest Johns on display than any other nuclear weapon and I didn’t even go to them all!
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Corrected a few typos and added the “Recent Updates” section at the bottom of the Home page. Additional work on the Honest John page. Corrected a few typos and preparing to go back and copyedit all text once I post Honest John. Also exploring interactive map plug-ins to display nuclear weapons locations.
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Further work on the essay for Honest John. Redesigned the main page–hopefully, more attractive and easier to navigate.
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The page for the Corporal missile is up. That’s the eighth weapons page–so many more to go! But still, good progress. Next up is, I think, the Honest John rocket. I’ve already put together a few ideas for the essay in my head this morning while I was in the shower…
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Today I selected/photoshopped the images for the Corporal missile and built all of the web page except for the essay. I was about to go to bed (it’s after midnight as I write this) but then had an idea for a note or two to leave myself that I would read in the morning on what the essay might say and, one thing led to another, I have a solid semi-draft ready for the morning.
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The page on the Matador is up. I used the new gallery with captions built-in and I think that is working out well. I’ll await more public feedback before I convert the older pages to the gallery system.
For the essay, I tried (after reading the Joanna Stern article in the Wall Street Journal on how she uses AI as her personal assistant) using ChatGTP 4.0 (the paid subscription version) to act as an editor for my essay. To my astonishment, it gave me quality feedback and seemed to “get” what I was aiming at in terms of style and structure. I didn’t make every change it suggested but I did make a few and rethought one paragraph based on its feedback. It was even able to send me an RTF file with the changes indicated by color (with a before/after section for comparison). I’m on a Mac and not using Microsoft products but apparently, if I did ChatGTP could have sent me a doc file with “track changes” enabled to make accepting/rejecting the suggestions much easier.