Random Notes - A Blog

31 March 2007
The trickle of contributions at the beginning of this site has developed into a regular torrent. Recent correspondence brings further photographs from Butch Kmet, our regular correspondent in Utah. Rick McNees sends images from his recent travels, including those of Wright buildings in Oak Park. And architect Richard Kenyon of Avon, Connecticut offers many additions to the state lists and an archive of photos from his many travels. All of these threaten to overwhelm my simple efforts to keep up. But you’ll soon see the work of these generous people, which is expanding what the world knows about the Prairie School.

13 March 2007
Site statistics are a fascination to every webmaster. The Web gives anyone with a computer and a few dozen dollars for hosting a tub to thump in front of the world. While the slender thread of the Web reaches virtually every country on the globe, it does so with a certain anonymity. All of us who’ve put up a website want to know whether our efforts are being appreciated, and though we receive actual human contact in the form of e-mails, we crave the knowledge that the wider world is as enthralled with our enthusiasms as we are. So, though this falls on no convenient anniversary of the establishment of this site (the usual pretext for trotting out such data), here is some navel-gazing at the numbers associated with The Prairie School Traveler.

This site went live at the end of October 2005, and a mass e-mailing was made to architectural magazines, prominent PS authors, and all fifty State Historic Preservation Officers. In addition, postings were made on a number of Web-based architectural forums. Several further mailings went out in 2006, trumpeting various significant additions. The most notable of these were the many Florida pages provided by Wayne Wood in October; the attendant publicity explains the enormous November 2006 numbers.

The pages most visited, not suprisingly, are the listings for states rich in buildings:

Unlike the predictability of the top ten pages, the reasons for the popularity of some of the most viewed individual building pages are inscrutible. The No. 1 position of the Congregational Church Parish House in Eau Claire is explained by the fact that its photo, linked to the building’s page, is on the front page of this site. Sullivan’s buildings in Owatonna, Newark and Algona are no surprise. But how does one explain Colon or Goodrich?

From its modest beginnings sixteen months ago, the site now has over 6,000 individual HTML pages and photographs, totalling about 270 megabytes. Illinois is the leader, requiring 72 MB of space, with Florida a close second at 68 MB. Iowa, in some ways the most complete state, comes in at 36 MB, reflecting the smaller number of buildings overall.