Tag: genealogy

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technology

Online Genealogy

I stumbled upon a site called Geni today that was supposed to be a tool for online genealogy collaboration. What I found was not exactly what I had expected. It seems to be more heavily focused on the living generations and making connections. If I had been trying to describe its function with no knowledge of what they say they are trying to do I would have compared it to friendster, myspace, or facebook – a way of making connections online with people, in this case with those to whom you are related.

I had always seen genealogy as more interested in finding and connecting with generations past. Obviously this can lead to making connections with other relatives further from your immediate family. I found Geni through a post by Paul Allen who is actually working on an online genealogy collaboration site called FamilyLink. Based on what I could see I thought that FamilyLink might be more what I would have expected.

I am curious to know what other people think of Geni. Is it what you imagine when you think of genealogy, or could it be used for genealogical purposes? Does it look like something you would want to use? I am, as yet, undecided.

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life meta technology

WordPress(MU)

I have been hoping to move to WordPress as a show of my support for Open Source Software, and to keep myself free of the constraints of the free license for Movable Type. So far those constraints have not been a problem for my needs, but I would hate to move to another platform in a crunch so I am looking while it is anything but urgent.

Unfortunately my needs include having multiblog support because I am unwilling to run multiple sets of tables to manage my multiple blogs and I want some central control for all my blogging. This meant that I had to find and attempt to use WordPress MU. I finally got it installed, but for some reason it does not produce blogs, just entries in my tables. Well, actually it produced a blog at wp.php rather than index.php but for the non-admin blogs it produced table entries only.

I considered some other OSS platforms for my site blogs, but I decided that – at least for now – they are not what I want. I have finally concluded that I have spent too much time on this project and I would rather devote myself to another, more altruistic, project on another site where I will be combining the wordpress software with phpGedView for a platform which will support online genealogy collaboration

While I will be focusing on that project, I would welcome any suggestions as to how to implement an OSS platform for multiple blogs that I can easily customize to look just like my current site and be fully valid XHTML.

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technology

Testing Content Management Systems

I am trying to start using a content management system that is free (as in – not the free license of a system like MT) and produces valid xhtml but I am unwilling to mess with this site where everything is running so smoothly. I once tried to move to WordPress when my site went down and found that it was easy to set up, but I could not do anything. I got a blank site and no way to access the simplest publishing or administrative interface. I have no idea what was wrong but I am less excited about WordPress than I was before.

I finally found a solution. I am going to set up a blog etc. on my family genealogy site. If I get a working system I will test how easy it is to port these blogs to the new format. If I find a good combination I will change all of this, but hopefully the end users (if there are any of you) will see almost exactly what you are seeing now. I have a couple of systems to try – WordPress (it will probably get a second chance), Mambo and Drupal.

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technology

phpGedView

I got the family genealogy site up in skeletal fashion. Enough to know that it basically works. I can’t wait to get it fleshed out and get more people adding to it as time goes by. At the suggestion of a cousin of mine I used phpGedView to manage the gedcom files on the site. So far I am very pleased.

Categories
life technology

Genealogy Site

I have got the genealogy site that I talked about in Online Genealogy. It is located at www.miller-genealogy.us although right now it is only a message which talks about the site before redirecting any visitors back to this site.

I will report progress on the site development here as it progresses . . . slowly.

Categories
life

Online Genealogy

My mom just agreed to pay for a domain name registration for a family genealogy site so that my brothers and I can combine our genealogy work in a central location. That is exciting for me because I get to try to implement my ideas for a system of online genealogy collaboration.

Categories
technology

Genealogy Collaboration Online

I have been thinking about how to effectively use the internet to work with other people in my family on the same line from different locations. I have thought about using a wiki structure. I am now thinking that it should be based on some widely used genealogy software such as Personal Ancestral File so that the web pages can be easily converted to offline editable forms.

The next consideration I thought about was ensuring the integrity of the information being added to the files. That is as easy to ensure online as offline if you limit the people who can contribute to the people you know who participate in genealogy offline already. The problem is that I expect the list of names to grow and converge with other lines so that new people would like to participate who I don’t know. If I open it up to unknown users I have to find a way to know if someone is playing a prank on me or really interested in adding to my genealogy file. Actually I know that very few people would waste their time playing a prank on my genealogy, but I do not want people adding information if the information is based on poor research. I think that the solution is to require logon credentials and only allow people to log on if they can prove a connection to the line. This will give them a vested interest in keeping the information as accurate as possible. The logins would be simple and not designed for security, but we would also be able to trace who was entering information and contact them if the information was consistently suspect.