Welcome, new visitors!

The WHM site seems to be quite slow this morning, probably as a result of a rush of visitors after the general election. Welcome, all!

Semi-secret museum semi-secrets

The addition of pictures to the Sub-Basement page brought up the subject of "semi-secret" WHM pages. These are pages—or even just individual pictures—that you might not be aware of even if your are a fairly thoro visitor to this site. They aren't semi-secret because of any inherent security concern, but merely because they are labeled or are otherwise unexpected.

The horseshoe pitch is right next to the pool (very clear on Pete's 3D rendering). There is a link to it on the main Grounds page, but that part of the map is not colored, so you might not have found it. Same goes for the Andrew Jackson milk trough on the south lawn.

First Lady's Office hall. Just a dude in the hallway outside the First Lady's Offices, available from the EW second floor page. The East Wing Entrance, altho labeled on the EW first floor page, is easy to miss.

A back staircase photo is available from each of the Residence floor pages by clicking on the staircase next to the Family Elevator.

The Pastry Kitchen is on the first floor mezzanine level and available by a link on the oblique diagram.

The arched hall on the third floor is available from an unlabeled link on the third floor page. The mysterious Bathroom 315, near the Family Elevator, is likewise available, marked only with a "B". And the third floor storage rooms under the roof have a page of their own as well, with an unlabeled link.

The West Wing Navy Mess reception desk is represented by an unlabeled photo link in the middle of the hall on the WW ground floor. Not far away is an unlabeled link to the Situation Room entrance, altho this is probably different since the area was remodeled.

The West Wing stair corridor and east entry corridor are available from unlabeled links on the WW first floor page. A little lavatory off the Oval Office Corridor is on its page.

Then there's the Front Page Gallery page, available only from the Site Map page. The Truman Reconstruction page includes a thumbnail of the 1945 WW expansion plan and tiny links to large images of the ground, first, second floor plans, side view and cross section, and a smaller second try at coaxing Congress into paying for it.

New look

Freshened the look of the site for 2008 with a different color scheme and border. You may need to refresh some pages to see the changes.

2000 Symposium pics

Nick Valenziano (Nix) kindly sent some photos from his visit to the White House Symposium in 2000, which include a couple of rare shots of restrooms as well as a nice one of the China display cases and a really, really nice one of the Family Theater. Thanks, Nick!

Simultaneously, I have begun (on the Ground Floor) adding little maps to each room page—snippets of the floor plan—to help orient the reader about where the doors and windows and fireplaces are in that room.

New menu navigation

I've completed the conversion to the new menu navigation system. Now, all pages have menus that drop from the existing buttons. With this, you can get to any floor in the Residence, East Wing, or West Wing immediately.

You may need to refresh some pages to get the new functionality.

New navigation and menus

I've posted new pages for the West Wing and East Wing, breaking out the floors separately from the overview as for the Residence. This is preparation for implementing new menus for each section, as on the test page.

Update: I've begun converting the pages to the new menu navigation. So far, all the "top level" pages are converted (intro and floor plans).

Update: All done.

More menu experiments

I found what I think is a better menu method for enhancing navigation and experimented with it on a new test page. This keeps my buttons and just adds drop-down menus from them, which looks good and is very slick. I haven't created separate pages for the wings, so those links go to the Residence right now. It will be a bit easier to implement this code than it would have been to implement the other.

I found the code here.

Menu experiment

I started experimenting with a new navigation menu I found. I'd like to convert to new, more dynamic navigation to better enable users to get to the floor they want in the part of the mansion they want (I'd create separate pages for each floor of the East and West Wings.

Here is my experiment page, not quite laid out right. The code to do this would be a pain to add to every page, so I'm looking for something that I might be able to do in a streamlined way (with a couple of carefully-constructed find-and-replace functions).