Who Was That Person?

Archive for July, 2010

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.

Finally got the first-draft of the Rec2Gen website online today. There is still lots to do, especially behind the scenes on the software. I want to make it easy for site administrators to add information, and easy for users to find information. Sounds simple enough.

I welcome comments on the site here on this blog. I hope people can see some of the potential lurking behind the skeleton that is there now … I’ll keep working to expand the data on the main site while finishing up the odds and ends that need to be added — like the privacy policy statement, a contact form and whatnot.

Then I need to get working on the programs that will drive the county sub-sites. I’ll be making a site for Erie County New York (the city of Buffalo and environs) as a working example. Much of the software will be same as on the main site, but much of it needs revision to make it usable by owners of the sub-sites. I know how to work things, the limits and so forth, but another user would not — so I need to program in the checks and warnings to keep them from doing inappropriate things with the data.

For example, dates are always entered in a standard format:  1905-05-23 — it just makes it easier to sort if the year comes first, then the month. Dates are not displayed that way — they are converted to the more familiar genealogy standard of 23 May 1905 style, but they need to be entered correctly. The same goes for locational information, names and just about everything else — the program ‘expects’ the data in a particular format — sometimes the data entry program converts pre-formatted data, other times it must be standardized by the person entering data.

Keep watching this site for further developments and announcements. Why not subscribe to the feed (click on the orange button) — I will not be posting on any regular schedule, so it is easier to get notified by news-feed when there is a new post.