This week has had a lot of good coverage of the anniversary of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Charles Apple has had updates almost every day, showing some of the fine work newspapers and their websites have done in anticipation of today’s milestone. He wrote about The Boston Globe’s coverage on Wednesday.

My former paper, The Florida Times-Union, has also been busy with its coverage. They’ve done a lot of things, and I won’t mention all of it today, but it’s been good.

What I want to point out is the great web presence for the 9/11 packages. Check out the main page for the Times-Union’s coverage:

See those cool illustrations in the background? Those are from Kyle Bentle.

At the bottom is a neat timeline:

There’s also a piece called, “The Fallen,” looking at the servicemen, servicewomen and civilian contractors with ties to Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia have died.

Tracy Jones and Kate Howard worked on “The Fallen” and the timeline at the bottom. Kate says,

The goal of each: to be as comprehensive as possible about the impact of 9/11 locally, in the context of how our country has changed. Both pieces were part of the larger project we called “Since 9/11,” which included 8 days of stories and a user project asking readers to share their stories. That generated more than a hundred reader-submitted memories.

As you can imagine, this project was no small task. They worked on it off and on for about two months.

Tracy writes:

For the military piece, we tasked ourselves with finding any member of any branch of the military who died since 9/11. Our criteria was they had to be currently enlisted (including reserves). Some died in combat, others in accidents and some suicides, but the last thing we wanted to do was forget anybody.

Gathering the list was a task. Kate and I went to our memorial wall, but found there were errors there. We made many phone calls to families, branches and other sources, and we were able to track down information on all of the soldiers, which turned out to be 108 of them. Finding the photos wasn’t too easy either, because none of the military branches keep the photos on file, we basically had to dig for each one we didn’t have in our system.

To organize all the information, we kept an excel doc, which was later imported into a script that generated the information boxes for each soldier.

The photos are based on a jpeg we created of all the faces. We made one in black and white and also in color so it would change when their faces were clicked on.

Again, I urge you to check out the main page for the Times-Union’s coverage. I’m proud of my friends and former colleagues. If there’s any T-U work I missed, send it my way and I’ll post it.