Who Was That Person?

There may not be much apparent activity at the Rec2Gen site, but that is because I’m working on the software for the first sub-site, for Erie County (Buffalo and environs) in New York. I want to be sure that site-owners will be able to personalize their own county sites, but still have all the basic data that makes up the heart of the system. So I’m writing the program that will store the information about a site that controls it’s appearance, and allows the site owner to add web pages, edit existing pages, or modify the appearance of any page or for the site as a whole.

Mostly, that means providing a variety of templates, so the owner can choose to have one, two or three columns of data, control the width of each column, as well as background color or images. Type font styles, size and color will all be individually controllable for different headings and text areas. In computer code this is mostly done with CSS — cascading style sheets — so the site can be modified in ways that substantially change the appearance, without affecting the underlying data or content that is displayed. That means that appearances can be changed at any time, without any loss of data or need to reformat everything.

To make sure everything works as planned, and the software is easy to use, I’ll be using this program to create the first county site. Then I’ll have several programs for the owner to enter and manipulate data — some of which I’ve already written for the main site, and others of which will be written as needed to generate data for that first site. With data entry software, the emphasis is on ease of use, efficiency and speed. In a future post I’ll go into more details about the planned content for those county sites — the ultimate goal is make them the most useful locality sites for genealogists of all levels of experience and expertise.