Technology is a good thing for publishers, scholars, and readers. But the pace of technological change can sometimes be so fast that it leaves us all bewildered at times. So it was lately when Apple announced that it was rolling out its new iCloud computing technology. Lots to like, along with a new operating system: automatic synching between devices for images, music, text, spreadsheets, etc. But there was a catch: the “old” iDisk technology, along with other Apple remote server tools, was ending on June 30, 2012.
That meant that the hosting platform for all of Italica Press’s Naples image galleries, linked to our
Interactive Map of Medieval Naples, would disappear in two weeks, along with all that online content, unless we moved as quickly as the rate of technology change. Well, there’s good news: we have.
Beginning today, all Italica Press Naples image galleries — and all hyperlinks from the Interactive Map — will now be using the
Flickr platform. While this has taken some work to migrate all those hundreds of images, Flickr itself has many benefits, including advantages over the old iMac Gallery technology: images are more easily uploaded, sorted, tagged, sized, viewed, and glossed. They are also more discoverable by Internet search engines. Online images galleries is also Flickr’s business. All-in-all a change for the better.
Some things still need to be updated: the hyperlinks for the Kindle editions of our
Medieval Naples series will have to be redirected; and the list of URLs in the appendix to the print edition of Caroline Bruzelius and William Tronzo’s
Medieval Naples: An Architectural & Urban History, 400–1400 (p. 125) will need revision. We’ll provide an online, downloadable concordance to those links; but most will be straightforward and transparent by simply using the now updated Interactive Map.
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