New at washingtonpost.com: Faces of the Fallen 2.0

Written by Adrian Holovaty on April 13, 2006

Just launched at work: Faces of the Fallen, a browsable database of U.S. service members who've died in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Technically this is version 2 of the site. The first version, which washingtonpost.com has had for years, was a single-page Flash application. Now we've given it the full browsable-database treatment, with permalinks for everything.

Django-powered, the site lets you browse by age, death date, home state and city, military branch or multiple search criteria. Each soldier gets his or her own page, as does each date, American city, age, military branch, etc. There's an RSS feed for recent casualties, a feed for each state and a feed for each military branch. We've integrated Google Maps on several pages to highlight service members' hometowns.

Let me know if you have any ideas for how we can improve the site.

Comments

Posted by Wilson Miner on April 13, 2006, at 11:43 p.m.:

The site looks great, and the data is a perfect candidate for the patented Adrian/Django treatment.

Posted by Tim Churches on April 14, 2006, at 12:38 a.m.:

To properly test the scalability of Django, how about adding an additional 34,000 or so entries for each of the civilian casualties of the "coalition of the willing" military intervention in Iraq? See http://www.iraqbodycount.net/ for some initial data to populate the site.

Posted by Sergej Boriskin on April 17, 2006, at 11:05 p.m.:

I had always thought that no President would be able to surpasss Nixon as being the worse elected official ever. However, I do believe we have hit a new low with this clown.

Posted by David Salamon on April 23, 2006, at 7:08 a.m.:

the view service members by "home state" should be called "view map": it took me far to long to find the map :)

other than that it's fantastic :D

Posted by Anthony on April 28, 2006, at 5:23 a.m.:

Amazing! Wow, that is such a powerful application and with the easy permalinks, it really is resourceful. Nice job.

Posted by Richard Lichlyter-Klein on May 3, 2006, at 3:44 p.m.:

Well done treatment of a difficult/sad issue. I notice you are using an iframe to show gmaps... Is that best way around the url limitations of the gmap api?

Posted by Adrian on May 3, 2006, at 5:06 p.m.:

Richard: Yeah, I always tend to use iframes with Google Maps to overcome the URL limitation. I use the same technique on chicagocrime.org.

Posted by Stephan on July 31, 2006, at 10:47 p.m.:

Adrian,

I am little late in finding this but...

First, thank you for this. It is good to see a site that puts a face with a name. Having lost two friends in Iraq, this serves their memory well.

Secondly, searching on rank would be a huge help. I am not sure if you are holding that in its own field but if you are that would be a great alternative way to search.

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