Home
Hey, I'm Gideon.
I'm a processing archivist, which means that I organize collections donated to an archive and make those collections accessible to the public. This is my tiny page of the internet. Here, you can find links to my CV, some examples of my work, and a handful of photographs I've taken. If I get feisty, maybe there will be a blog here. Unlikely though.
I'm a writer in my spare time, and have written things that you may have read. I write scholarly arcticles about archives, fiction, essays about video games (on occasion), and poetry.
All apologies to Quinn Warnick; I'm reasonably certain you told us never to make a website like this in class.
Website code borrowed from Jack Grimes and you can borrow it, too!
Gideon Goodrich
gideong at umich dot edu | they/them
Library and Archives Experience
Archivist for Archival Processing — Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan May 2023 - Present
- Independently and collaboratively perform intellectual appraisal, arrangement, archival description, and preservation of material in diverse physical and born-digital formats.
- Create EAD finding aids and MARC records for review by the Lead Archivist for Collections Management using tools like ArchivesSpace and Archivematica, as well as national best practices, DACs, and locally developed practices.
- Practice innovative and extensible methodologies for effective and efficient processing of archival collections.
- Employ reparative description best practices and guidelines to review and enhance the Bentley's legacy archival description of collections by and about historically marginalized and underrepresented groups.
- In collaboration with others, create an action plan aimed to establish a systematic approach to reparative and conscientious description of Bentley collections.
- Engage in Bentley-wide initiatives and collaborative projects.
Research Services Librarian — Special Collections Research Center, University of Michigan October 2021 - May 2023
- Designed and administered service models that deliver high-quality, user-centered services with available resources; explored and implemented changes to service models and supporting processes.
- Administered the online registration and materials request software; worked with colleagues to ensure that collection material was onsite and ready for use for patron appointments.
- Developed, documented, implemented, evaluated, and communicated policies and procedures governing the use, reproduction, and handling of collection material.
- Responded to general and collection-related inquiries, including those regarding publication and use of collection material.
- Collaborated with public services staff in other library units to align goals and share best practices.
- Gathered and reported usage and other statistics.
How to Publish
Uploading
Getting your site public is easier and cheaper than ever. A really popular option these days is Neocities, which is pretty easy to use and well-documented. They offer a paid plan with extra storage and some other neat features, but you can make something totally fleshed-out with the couple gigabytes you get for free. Neocities also has an in-browser HTML editor and file manager, which is so sick when you upload a page and realize there's a typo in it.
If you want to set out on your own, I use Netlify for all my sites. Netlify is a little intimidating because it's meant for businesses, so it'll show you a bunch of popups about A/B testing and node functions and other nerd stuff. But that also means it's free to use as a regular person, so I just ignore all those and drag & drop my little folders.
Netlify also lets you upload a text file of automatic redirects, which I think is pretty slick compared to using Linktree or whatever—you can go to jackis.online/videos to get straight to my Youtube, for example.
Anyway, using either of these services is pretty straightforward, especially for a one-file site like this one. Just rename it to index.html, upload it, and you're rolling.
Getting a Domain
Getting a custom domain name is optional, but I think it's cool. It does cost some money, depending where you buy it (I use Namecheap), but if you buy a goofy domain nobody else wants you're only gonna be looking at five or ten bucks a year.
To hook up a vanity URL to your site, you'll have to do some stuff with DNS records. This process is different for every domain broker and hosting platform, so just look for the instructions on the service you chose. I believe in you.
Bonus
Look, this is jokes:
Has Gideon Read Gideon the Ninth?
Eric Meyer's CSS reset is a sheet that will reset all the weird annoying default properties some HTML elements have. Keep in mind that stylesheets are applied in the order they're linked.
LayoutIt is a great tool for making CSS grids and flexboxes and stuff. I love a CSS grid but remembering all the right syntax is a pain. So just use this.
CSSmatic has some nice generators for things like gradients and shadows, which are also annoying to try and make by typing code.
Google Fonts has a ton of open-source typefaces that are really easy to embed and use on your webpage. Some of them are even good!
Squoosh is a tool for compressing images, which is handy if you're hosting them yourself somewhere like Neocities with a storage cap. Or you could go old-school:
Dither Me This is for dithering images, which compresses them way more and looks cooler than JPEG compression. Dither It! is a similar tool that gives you more options.
Tips
It's good manners to include target="_blank" on links to an external site. This makes the link open in a new tab.
CSS has a lot of features meant to make your site more accessible. Use them! Images have an alt="" tag for description text. @media queries can check a user's preferences for contrast and input device.
Margin goes outside of a box. Padding goes between the box and its contents. Temporarily giving an element a bright background color or border can help you figure out where its edges are.
Some special characters (< and >, etc.) need to be typed in HTML as something else or the computer will choke on them. For example, & is encoded as &. This is dumb but what are you gonna do.
An em is a unit about the size of a capital X in regular body text. It's good to use ems instead of pixels for sizing & moving things so they look right on more screens.
The most important tip is to have fun :)
Hello!
This one-page style of website does allow you to have sections that don't appear in the nav, since you choose what to type up there. But it's still all visible in the source, so it's a bad hiding place.