Today’s cool Northern Web sites
Back in February 1997 when I opened my “Yukon & Alaska History” Web site, the Internet was an exciting new world. Wonderful new Web sites were appearing all the time, and I used to post links to the best I’d found that week. When I joined “The Mining Company” Web site directory as their Guide to Yukon & Alaska History a couple of months later, I started a “Site of the Day” feature (The Mining Company became About.com in 1999, by which time I was the Guide to Arctic/Northern Culture). The animated gif below was part of the first major ad program for The Mining Company.
Things eventually got pretty predictable and my “Site of the Day” became the “Site of the Week”. When I left About.com in 2001 to focus on ExploreNorth (a financially difficult decision), “Site of the Week” continued but a couple of years ago it became “Site of the Month“. This past spring I even quit that, as I just never found anything worth linking to as really special.
Today, while in the midst of updating hundreds of pages at ExploreNorth, though, I found Athropolis, a site about the Arctic aimed at kids [archived by the Wayback Machine]. Though the design looks very old, it’s huge, fairly easy to navigate, and fun. Whether you want trivia-of-the-day, news or weather from across the circumpolar North, or articles about sled dogs or the British “Discovery Service”, it’s there. Finding Athropolis makes me miss the way it used to be – I hope that I’m not just jaded after a decade+ of doing this.
Ned Rozell at the Alaska Science Forum can be counted on to deliver an interesting article about the North almost every week, but I found this week’s particularly fascinating as he discusses new laser-rangefinding equipment that’s being used to find out how high our tallest peaks really are. Maybe Mount Logan really has grown 23 feet since it was last measured in 1992?
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