Joining the Fray for Historic Preservation

Posted on June 2, 2008
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Daffodil Hill - Murfreesboro, TN I attended a nice "open house" for a local historical preservation group in Murfreesboro, TN last Friday… and joined.

The Heritage Partnership of Rutherford County (HPRC) was formed when members of several local historic and community organizations realized that progress was bulldozing the historic sites of Murfreesboro and Rutherford County under at an alarming rate and something needed to be done before it was too late. For example, the city of Murfreesboro participated and encouraged the complete destruction of the Sill’s Ridge/Gresham House portion of the Murfreesboro battlefield. It was arguably the most historically significant section of battlefield outside of the national battlefield park. The landscape was completely destroyed and changed in order to build Medical Center Parkway and The Avenue shopping center. (I love the shopping center and road. I hate that they destroyed valuable battlefield to build them.)

May is Preservation Month and the HPRC capped it off with a nice gathering at "Daffodil Hill", an antebellum home on East Main Street in Murfreesboro. The gathering was fortunate for me in that it allowed me the opportunity to accomplish two goals. The first is joining a good local history-based organization. (I had been involved with the Friends of Stones River National Battlefield for a year, but that ended for several reasons I won’t get into here.) The second was to see the inside of the old Arnold-Harrell-McNabb home (pictured above). I’ve passed by it for years and yearned to see what the inside looked like. During the Civil War, a Captain Arnold was reportedly living in the house and helped Nathan Bedford Forrest in his capture (liberation?) of Murfreesboro from Union forces in July, 1862.

The house was incredibly beautiful and stuffed with antiques. The owner, Kirby McNabb, deserved high accolades for doing a fantastic job of restoration and renovation to the house.

I will say that we seemed to be terribly under-dressed. The affair seemed to have been attended by Murfreesboro’s "in crowd" and they all dressed nicely in suits and dresses, or at least nice Khakis and dress shirts. My wife and I came directly from work and had on jeans. I don’t much care what other people think most of the time, so didn’t give it too much thought, but my wife was very uncomfortable about the situation. I did catch a few of couple of the "upper crust" women giving us looks like they couldn’t believe we’d have so little couth as to show up under-dressed, but that actually made me laugh at them, not cringe. For the most part though, the group was cordial and inviting.

I’ve approached them and offered to help them with their website or gathering info on Rutherford County historic sites. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get involved soon.

Still Rolling Along

Posted on May 29, 2008
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Pastigo.com home page It’s been a month since we updated to the new site layout. Good things and bad things have happened.

 1. The site update made slight changes to the URLs for the pages. This basically broke the links from all of our Google search listings. For all intents and purposes, we’re having to be recrawled by Google’s spiders and relisted. It’s also negatively affected (for the moment) the rankings of our pages that have good links. Our approximately 1,000 unique visitors a month generated from Google searches have pretty much evaporated. However, we expect this issue to be resolved in a few weeks.

2. We’ve stamped out some bugs in the new layout. We have a few more to run down and fix, but for the most part the site is working properly again. 

This was our first major site upgrade and we learned quite a bit from doing it. Hopefully, we won’t have to do it again for some time. In the mean time, we’re still working on adding some new features and functionality. We’ve gotten some great positive feedback on the new look. Keep it coming!

In the meantime, remember that history is too important to leave in the past.

Upated Site Goes Live

Posted on May 1, 2008
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Last week we rolled out our newly updated sites.  We’re still working out some kinks, but it’s getting there. Basically, the old site had some restrictions and didn’t make the best use of space. So the whole site was completely rebuilt from the ground up.

    The new site should stretch full screen. We simplified the menu structure, upgraded all of the features and did away with the "splash" screen that you first saw when arriving at pastigo.com. Now, you just go straight to the map page. Additionally, the map was updated to include Alaska and Hawaii, an unintentional oversight on the first version. We still have a long "to do" and "wish" list to work on, but this is a great start.

Give the new site a run and see what you think. Let us know if you run into any problems or see things we can improve. We want to make this site as useful to you as possible. Send your comments directly to me at darrin@pastigo.com.

In the meantime, have a historic day and remember, history is too important to leave in the past.

 Darrin

Small Bump This Morning

Posted on August 7, 2007
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The component that allows for search engine friendly URLs had a small glitch this morning and some of the links to historic sites didn’t work for a few hours. However, we got it smoothed out this morning. It appears to be working alright now.

Changes Abound

Posted on August 6, 2007
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For anyone who hasn’t visited Pastigo.com in the past three weeks, things have changed quite a bit. Here’s a quick run down of some of the changes:

  • We now offer a blog for any registered user – you can blog about your history research, interests and, most importantly, your trips to historic destinations.
  • We have have installed search engine friendly (SEF) urls – this means that now, instead of having long ridiculous URLs, we’ll have short ridiculous URLs.
  • We have added some initial social networking functions – including expanding your profile information, allowing users to connect with one another and listing what periods of US history you’re interested in.

Come experience the changes. Till then, I’ll see you somewhere in the past.

Name Dropped Again…And Lovin’ It

Posted on August 1, 2007
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We got mentioned on another cool site today. We were mentioned in an article titled “Web Two Point Oh Snap That’s Cool…Part Two“. Thanks to Lakingaz for finding and mentioning us.

Another Birthday…

Posted on August 1, 2007
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Happy birthday to Francis Scott Key who was born on this day in 1779. He was a successful lawyer, but best remembered as the author of the Star Spangled Banner which he wrote after witnessing the British bombardment of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812.

Deadwood et al.

Posted on June 27, 2007
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I want to take a trip to Deadwood, SD and see Cheyenne Frontier Days in Wyoming. I want to visit Wounded Knee , Little Big Horn , Yellowstone & Mount Rushmore. Is that wrong?

We’re a Killer Startup Site!

Posted on May 30, 2007
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We’re honored and tickled a little pinkish that KillerStartups.com has added us to their list as a… well, Killer Startup. Check it out here.

Travel Blogs Wanted

Posted on May 29, 2007
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I’m looking for a good travel blog provider who will partner/affiliate with us to allow our users to create free travel blogs. Tell us who your favorite is!

I’ve found several, but most seem to already be connected with site listing providers or have that function incorporated into their site already. But NONE of them is history-centric and we want to cater to you, history-lover. Send us some love and tell us who you recommend. Better yet, if you’re a travel blog provider, let us take your to our leader. Simply contact us.

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    Welcome to the blog for Pastigo.com, the site that lets you find, rate and review historic sites in the United States. Check back often to see what's going on with the website as well as news and opinion on matters dealing with history and historic sites in the U. S.

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